Boston, MA: A new analysis released June 28 by Ceres shows that many of the nation’s largest electric utilities and their local subsidiaries are moving toward lower carbon fuel sources and that ambitious state policies and strong corporate demand for renewable energy are key drivers of this trend.
As the report notes,
• U.S. clean energy deployment has reached all-time highs. The U.S. added a record 7.3 gigawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity and 8.6 GW of wind in 2015, bringing total installed capacity to 25.6 GW for solar PV and 74.4 GW for wind.
• Energy storage—a potentially grid-transforming technology—has grown by leaps and bounds. California’s first-in-the-nation energy storage mandate helped to catalyze nearly 250 percent growth in U.S. energy storage deployments from 2014 to 2015, with eight-fold growth predicted over the next five years.
• State policy approaches to address the recent rapid expansion of distributed solar PV have become a top-tier concern. All but four U.S. states took some type of solar policy action in 2015.
The 2016 Benchmarking Utility Clean Energy analysis ranks the 30 largest electric utility holding companies and their 119 subsidiary companies, which collectively account for about 60 percent of U.S. retail electricity sales. The results show overall advances on renewable energy and energy efficiency in 2014, the latest year for which data is available.
Wide disparities in the utilities’ clean energy performance remain, however. The table shows Sempra Energy at the top for sales of renewable energy (36.45%), and PG&E not far behind at 25.9%. Utilities with the strongest results were typically in states with strong clean energy policies, such as Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts and California. The lowest-ranked utilities were mostly in southeast states, such as Alabama and Mississippi, which have weak state policies.
“Renewable energy and energy efficiency, key building blocks of the Clean Power Plan, are increasingly cost-effective options for electric utilities looking to lower their carbon emissions,” said Dan Bakal, Director of electric power programs at Ceres, a nonprofit sustainability advocacy organization. “Our analysis shows that the U.S. electric sector is in the midst of an unprecedented shift toward clean energy resources and that state policies are critical for continued progress in achieving national and international climate goals.”
Among the report’s other key findings:
• The Clean Power Plan’s key approaches to compliance, energy efficiency and renewable energy, are increasingly economically feasible options for electric utilities. Energy efficiency is the lowest-cost energy resource and renewable energy costs continue to decline dramatically.
• State policies are no longer the only driver of utility clean energy deployment. Companies with ambitious renewable energy sourcing goals are using their voice as major energy users to encourage utilities to offer more renewable energy. A consortium of major companies pledged not only to promote 60 gigawatts of new renewables development, but also to help overcome the barriers that complicate clean energy procurement. Companies are sourcing ever-greater amounts of clean energy directly from utilities.
• Performance is not the only measure of clean energy leadership, which should include utility support for clean energy policies. For example, National Grid and PG&E have been outspoken supporters of energy efficiency, while FirstEnergy has been a vocal critic of Ohio’s energy efficiency policy and supported efforts to freeze the state’s goals.