Residential rooftop solar project in rural Vermont. Image credit: NYT [1]
The renowned Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and the University of Texas-Austin (UTA) each have new studies showing that using clean energy resources at the local level can save customers millions, protect against power outages and avoid building costly and climate-wrecking fossil fuel power plants and transmission infrastructure.
The studies further boost NC WARN’s new "Sharing Solar" proposal to state regulators that will expand local solar-plus-storage (SPS) by paying for new installations on roofs, parking lots and more through the rate system – the way we’re now all forced to pay for dirty power [2].
The Sharing Solar approach will benefit all Duke Energy customers as the fastest, cheapest and fairest way to tackle the climate crisis and soaring power bills.
Rooftop solar is more expensive than utility-scale, but that gap is driven by the "soft costs" of a niche business that has to spend most of its money on advertising and sales. Under NC WARN's Sharing Solar proposal, economies of scale would heavily erode that gap. Image credit: National Renewable Energy Laboratory [3]
With evidentiary hearings over Duke Energy’s carbon plan set to begin Monday at two o'clock at the North Carolina Utilities Commission (NCUC), it’s likely that both utility and regulator will keep trying to avoid debating SPS, as they have since NC WARN first proposed it in 2017 [4]
Duke Energy continues to suppress rooftop solar and other climate solutions in favor of high-risk, high-dollar fossil fuel and failure-prone nuclear gambles [5]. With few exceptions, Duke Energy maintains successful pressure on media bosses to keep alternatives to its plans out of the public eye despite good journalists trying to do their jobs.
The new RMI study describes how Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are scaling up among many utilities nationally and can quickly offset the need for new gas-fired power plants and save huge amounts of money [6]. VPPs are where utilities pay residential and business customer for the right to draw from their SPS batteries and sometimes even electric vehicles during periods of high system-wide demand. VPPs are part of our Sharing Solar proposal.
NC WARN recently cited earlier work by RMI and others promoting the enormous benefits of generating and storing electricity where it’s being used instead of going along with a prodigious national public relations campaign by Duke and others pressing to spend decades and trillions of dollars gambling on massive and controversial transmission projects [7].
“The cheapest, most reliable power can be produced renewably and produced at or near the customers…” - Amory Lovins, clean energy expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute [8]
The deceptive utility campaign also claims SPS can’t help slow the climate crisis, but NC WARN has proven that North Carolina has over twice as much space for solar on roofs, parking lots and other local areas as needed to meet state climate goals [9].
Image credit: NC WARN [9, pg. 4]
As reported by Inside Climate News, the Texas researchers found that “batteries matched with rooftop solar can lead to 40 percent savings for all customers of a utility" [10]. And that reducing demand for electricity reduces the need to add new wires and grid equipment.
“It lowers the cost for everybody,” said the lead UTA author, a conclusion also reached in a 2021 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [11].
Inside Climate News journalist Dan Gearino reported that SPS isn’t embraced yet by more utilities because they don’t like reducing demand “because utilities make money by selling electricity and building infrastructure.” That’s long been the case with Duke Energy.
While projecting nearly zero rooftop solar for years to come, thanks largely to its gutting of solar net metering, Duke Energy’s carbon plan proposes to gamble some $10 billion on controversial transmission projects that wouldn't be complete for many years, if they're ever built at all.
Duke Energy’s current game is to keep our state’s best climate approach totally off the NCUC’s table and out of the news. It will be tragic and outrageous if the corporate behemoth remains successful with its anti-democratic strategy.
This article was first published by NC WARN.
Work Cited
Cardwell, Diane. “Utility Helps Wean Vermonters From the Electric Grid.” New York Times, 29 July 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/business/energy-environment/vermont-green-mountain-power-grid.html.
“Sharing Solar: A Sweeping Climate Proposal. NC WARN, 5 July 2024, www.ncwarn.org/our-work/sharing-solar.
“New Reports From NREL Document Continuing PV and PV-Plus-Storage Cost Declines.” National Renewable Energy Laboratory, www.nrel.gov/news/program/2021/new-reports-from-nrel-document-continuing-pv-and-pv-plus-storage-cost-declines.html.
Powers, Bill. “North Carolina Clean Path 2025: Achieving an Economical Clean Energy Future.” NC WARN, Aug. 2017, www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/NC-CLEAN-PATH-2025-FINAL-8-9-17.pdf.
"Duke Energy on Defense at NC Court of Appeals Over Regulators’ Agreement to Slash Solar Incentives.” NC WARN, 13 Feb. 2024, www.ncwarn.org/2024/02/duke-energy-on-defense-at-nc-court-of-appeals-over-regulators-agreement-to-slash-solar-incentives-news-release-from-nc-warn-ewg.
Brehm, Kevin, et al. “Meeting Summer Peaks: The Need for Virtual Power Plants”. Rocky Mountain Institute. July 2024, rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/06/VPP_reliability_brief.pdf.
“Lovins, Experts Support Solar-Plus-Storage as NC WARN Proposes.” NC WARN, 3 July 2024, www.ncwarn.org/2024/05/lovins-experts-support-solar-plus-storage-as-nc-warn-proposes-nc-warn-news-release.
Damiani, Bailey. “Podcast 082: Amory Lovins – Local Energy Was Born 20 Years Ago With the Book Small Is Profitable. Where Will It Go From Here?” Freeing Energy, 1 May 2022, www.freeingenergy.com/podcast-amory-lovins-local-energy-book-small-is-profitable.
“Moving North Carolina Forward: The Case for Local Solar-Plus-Storage.” NC WARN, 26 June 2023, www.ncwarn.org/wp-content/uploads/MovingNC-Forward.pdf.
Harrison, Derek. “Batteries and Rooftop Solar Can Lead to Huge Savings for the Entire Grid. A New Study Shows How—and How Much.” Inside Climate News, 28 June 2024, insideclimatenews.org/news/27062024/inside-clean-energy-rooftop-solar-grid-benefits.
“Value of Distributed Energy Resources Largely Depends on Three Things: Location, Location, Location.” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 12 Feb. 2021, emp.lbl.gov/news/value-distributed-energy-resources.
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