the book ReImagine Appalachia: Healing the Land and Empowering the people is now available in paperback and as an electronic edition from Springer Nature at a much reduced price from the originally published hardcover. You can order it here. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-61921-2
The concluding chapter is important today as we look toward the Midterm elections. Policy re-adjustments to enhance and grow the middle class upwards have worked. Policies proposed from the ReImagine Appalachia Blueprint and adopted into the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act and the CHIPS Act began to turn the curve towards investing in communities and working people, as opposed to further enrichment of the top 1% of the wealthy, as is happening now.
This reflection from Rachel Carson seems amazingly relevant for today’s situation:
Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy—no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction. (Carson RL (1998) The real world around us. In: Lear LJ (ed) Lost woods—the discovered writing of Rachel Carson. Beacon Press, Boston, p 163)
It is time for a new National Energy Policy to support a clean, modern energy system. The energy sector is the largest contributor to emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing climate change.[i] Consumers see rising prices for electricity and hear industry complaints about onerous regulations and government curtailment.[ii] Utility companies struggle to address reliability of service requirements and universal service standards even as data centers and AI applications add intense demands for electricity.[iii] Much of the focus on climate action involves shifting to electricity for buildings, transportation and even industry. If the country is to meet climate goals, the shift from burning coal, natural gas and petroleum for power generation must occur much more rapidly.[iv]
Transforming the nation’s energy system to one based on renewable and sustainable resources is a critical element in responding to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Unfortunately, practitioners in the renewable energy systems space currently encounter significant regulatory and institutional barriers to rapid and efficient implementation of new technologies and practices.[v] National energy policy is needed, including an update to the energy industry’s regulatory framework, to advance the modernization of our country’s electricity delivery system.
The current regulatory framework is built around centralized energy generation from utility monopolies that deliver electricity to customers residing across a wide geographical territory. Under the National Energy Act of 1992, partial deregulation of the nation’s electricity system took place, leaving a patchwork quilt of conditions in place across the country: 17 states are fully competitive with customer choice for electricity generation and gas supplies; 9 are deregulated for gas suppliers only; and 23 remain fully regulated for electricity and gas.
Modernizing the nation’s electrical grid system means moving away from this current model of centralized energy generation towards generating energy on site or nearer to the consumer. In this emerging, more distributed energy system, customers may also be generators of the power they consume, they may have on-site storage for all or part of their demand, and buildings can even become virtual power plants by generating excess electricity that can be shared with others in need of that energy. This empirically straightforward approach that is technically feasible, economically beneficial and widely available unfortunately faces enormous difficulties when put into practice. For example, in a Pittsburgh community three municipal buildings adjacent to each other – the volunteer fire department, public works garage and storage shed and emergency management service – cannot share a common battery storage installation or share the solar photovoltaic electricity generated on three of the four roofs because a “public way” divides the space, and the buildings are wired to three different distribution grids, but not to each other. The cost to re-wire was more than the cost of installing all of the solar arrays! There is no standard interconnection protocol, and no tariff that fairly allocates costs and benefits. Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings are technically feasible.[i],[ii] We need to clear the regulatory hurdles to expand deployment to make buildings perform as virtual power plants.
Manufacturers and large-scale energy users explore the increasing benefits of co-generation, combined heat and power operations, and on-site storage. New high energy intensity operations like data centers and AI operations could benefit from co-locating efficient power generation on site and piping excess heat to neighboring facilities in need of that heat.[iii] A new regulatory system that accommodates customer generation can accelerate the necessary large- scale advance of renewable energy systems. However, there are few models for regulatory interface among producers and users of steam plus electricity, or waste heat and power. Such arrangements usually involve complicated business negotiations and are unique to each project. If distributed energy systems are to become mainstream and accessible to a multitude of energy system configurations, a regulatory system that defines the relationships and possibly new utility services and functions can expedite and streamline such transactions.
Major existing regulatory and institutional barriers
The regulatory system has accumulated policies and practices over decades, proving resistant to change even as technology advances have accelerated.[iv] The most significant regulatory and institutional barriers to modernization include:
Policy fragmentationacross jurisdictions. Federal, state, and local jurisdictions have differing and sometimes conflicting requirements making national markets difficult to pursue. To correct policy fragmentation, we need more standardization of methods and processes in a systems-oriented approach to regulatory infrastructure modernization.
Permitting complexity. Multiple agencies require differing and overlapping permit requirements, poorly sequenced with no clear path among multiple authorities. Grid integration challenges face transmission and distribution capacity constraints, as well as interconnection and Regional Transmission Organization [AW1] market rules, that pose barriers to renewable energy implementation, in modern utility operations, and impede net-zero greenhouse gas emissions outcomes.
Grid integration challenges. Utility systems have capacity constraints as well as a lack of interconnection infrastructure to support “two-way traffic” among customer/generators with or without on-site storage.
Lack of uniformly recognized guidelinesfor RECs. There is nostandard framework for defining Renewable Energy Certification (REC) credits that track and verify demand reduction or customer renewable energy generation across jurisdictions. Different states, and sometimes different utilities within states, have differing definitions, pricing and verification methods applied to RECs.
Erratic and unstable incentives. Production tax credits, investment tax credits, subsidies, land use allocations for federal land are subject to change with budget cycles unless established in law. The unstable incentives send the wrong pricing signals to the economy and foster inefficient choices for decades, impeding the progress to market transformation and decarbonization.
The current electricity system was designed for one-way flow of electricity from central power generation stations to distant residential, commercial and industrial customers. Now, several categories of customers also have the opportunity to generate electricity, and send it back into the electric grid. The electricity system, and the rules that govern it , are not designed for this two-way travel of electrons. In addition, standard interconnection procedures are needed for 1) virtual community power plants with or without storage; 2) standards regarding energy storage, steam/heat distribution or sale from combined heat and power operations, whether by a utility or a non-regulated entity; and 3) demand side management tied to time of use cost savings.[v] The integration of such services into the electric grid would benefit from innovations in communication technology and AI for real-time synchronization of both supply and demand side resources over daily and seasonal cycles.[vi] Many states have explored various approaches to regulatory incentives for renewable energy which provides a good place to begin to assemble the best practices across the country.[vii]
Opportunity for legislative action on national energy policy:
Three federal legislative initiatives will be pending over the next two years and could be legislative vehicles for the adoption of a national energy policy:
Reauthorization of Tax Reform Act of 2017
Regulatory Modernization and Permitting (especially shortening timelines)
Funding decarbonization and electrification initiatives from the Inflation Reduction Act
Budget authorization for programs under the Bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Updating a National Energy Policy to address the urgency of climate action as well as the complexity imposed by the accumulated regulatory fabric of past decades offers a unique opportunity to a new Administration. It is important for the next President to address a forward-looking energy policy that empowers and accelerates the critically necessary modernization of the energy system. Every citizen is affected every day by how cost-efficient, safe and reliable the energy system serves daily needs. Resolving the regulatory quagmire will pave the way for a clean and sustainable energy future.
[iv] Seetharaman, Krishna Moorthy, Nitin Patwa, Saravanan, and Yash Gupta. Breaking barriers in deployment of renewable energy. Heliyon 5 (2019) e01166. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2019. e01166
[v] G. Olabi, Khaled Alsaid, Khaled Obaideen, Mohammad Ali Abdelkareem, Hegazy Rezek, Tabbi Wilberforce, Hussein M. Maghrabi, Enas Taha Sayed. Renewable Energy Systems: Comparisons, challenges and barriers, sustainability indicators, and the contribution to UN sustainable development goals. International Journal of Thermofluids. 20(2023) 100498. www.sciencedirect.com/journal/international-journal-of-thermofluids
[iii] North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), Electricity Supply and Demand Data, 2023; Energy Information Administration (EIA) Monthly Energy Review; National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Pathways to 100% Clean Electricity, 2022. Note that electricity demand includes transmission losses and direct use. https://www.energy.gov/policy/articles/clean-energy-resources-meet-data-center-electricity-demand Accessed September 20, 2024.
Patricia DeMarco Ph.D. 