It looks like those energy standards set by Congress have hope after all. According to the recently released report, Community Power: Decentralized Renewable Energy in California, the way to meet those standards for California is through focusing on decentralized renewable energy. For those of you that don't know, decentralized energy is basically energy that is generated at the point of use, as opposed to centralized energy which utilizes the grid to distribute power. Not only are these findings applicable in California, but according to the report, they are applicable to all states in the US.
One of the main benefits of decentralized renewable energy is that there is no longer a need for expensive, high-voltage transmission lines that take up to 10 years to put in place. This greatly reduces the cost of energy, as well as saving time in the engineering process to come up with more efficient renewable practices. The major beneficiary of decentralized energy is solar power. Decentralized production from photovoltaics has better economics than centralized solar thermal plants. The report shows that through rooftop solar alone, California can exceed its requirement of 33% renewables by 2020. Decentralized wind also has promising results as well, and this report states that the only way for the RPS goals to be met by the required dates are through decentralized energy. [1]
With all of these great benefits from decentralized renewable energy, there may be problems in terms of financing, at least in California. Apparently the state has been very lazy in terms of enforcing the standards on utilities. So, these utilities haven't been doing much to produce more renewable energy sources. Federal laws have also been established in support of large-scale centralized energy. This means that the money may not be there to focus on decentralized energy. In order to overcome these barriers, there has to be some legislation passed in support of these methods. Colorado, for example, has passed a “community solar gardens” law to encourage the development of solar power with multiple owners and to allow folks without sunny roofs to “go solar.”
Hopefully, the funding for decentralization happens so that we can actually meet these RPS goals set by the government. As you can tell from an earlier post of mine, I was very pessimistic of actually meeting these goals, but now it looks more promising.
It seems to be working well in Germany, which adopted similar policies some years ago and now is at 15% renewables nationally. But, as you note, the policies have to be enforced.
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