Local climate action and adaptation is a relatively new planning consideration. Carefully planned and implemented, it can strengthen local economies, create local jobs, increase county and city tax revenues, and improve essential services. Local planning is essential because of local differences that cause large local deviations from statewide average energy usage patterns, transportation infrastructure, renewable resource opportunities, environmental concerns, and demographics.
Cities and counties can change the future course of local energy supply and usage. But they need to have a plan they are committed to implement. They also need energy expertise on staff. While analysis can be outsourced, planning must always be done by people who will execute the plan. The plan needs to account for technology and cost shifts that open pathways for local action to decarbonize electricity and fuel supply and usage.
Timely progress requires strategies for affordable action, that is also beneficial to local economies because residents and businesses will be investing time, making decisions, and bearing the costs under post-COVID economic conditions.
Community Choice Energy (CCE) is accelerating decarbonization of California’s electricity use. CCE service providers are a natural hub for collaborative engagement among local energy stakeholders and investors, including grid owners prosumers, counties and cities. But under current state imposed revenue diversions California CCEs cannot respond to local supply and energy resilience needs and opportunities, nor can they strike an economically beneficial long term balance between centralized and decentralized electricity supply for the areas they serve.
The menu of energy related actions that can be identified and prioritized in local climate action plans can be displayed in two main categories. Electricity and gas fuel decarbonization elements are additive, synergistic, and comparably effective in most local cases. They support faster decarbonization progress than renewable electricity alone. They are inter-dependent to the extent energy resilience is best (most cost-effectively and completely) achieved by including gas fueled electricity supply in the local electricity supply mix. Each menu category requires local implementation capacity. Prioritization of the categories should give close consideration to implementation capacity and strategies and actions to upgrade it.
Climate action and adaptation is a relatively new local planning consideration. It can strengthen local economies, create local jobs, increase county and city tax revenues, and improve essential services. Local planning is essential because of major local differences that cause big deviations from statewide average energy usage patterns, transportation infrastructure, renewable resource opportunities, environmental concerns, and demographics. One action plan does not fit all.
Local climate action and adaptation is a relatively new planning consideration. Carefully planned and implemented, it can strengthen local economies, create local jobs, increase county and city tax revenues, and improve essential services. Local planning is essential because of local differences that cause large local deviations from statewide average energy usage patterns, transportation infrastructure, renewable resource opportunities, environmental concerns, and demographics.
Collaboration between local governments and energy utilities to remove barriers and enable investment in local renewable supply is limited or lacking in most of the US. Meanwhile, many communities, states and countries now recognize and acknowledge the escalating global climate emergency. In a nautical context, the response to emergencies is “all hands on deck”. An all hands on deck response to climate emergency will require local government engagement in energy projects and programs.
What is the best mix of locally generated and imported energy from the perspectives of cost and resilience? The answer will be different for every community. Should we wait for the long-promised “smart electricity grid”? Or should our counties and cities take up the task of making local infrastructure not only smart but technically and economically well-integrated? If so, they will be wise to collaborate with incumbent energy utilities. And with local families and businesses as well.
The brilliant scientists who created nuclear weapons were appalled by what they had made possible. Nuclear war. During the Cold War, they saw humanity inching steadily toward self-annihilation. They started a movement among themselves to lobby for nuclear sanity. They used the image of a clock showing minutes to midnight to make plain the imminence of existential risk. It was on the cover of every issue of their monthly magazine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The minute hand moved back a bit when disarmament negotiations showed progress. It moved forward when tensions rose, or nuclear sabers rattled. We called it the Doomsday Clock. Clearly, humanity was in uncharted territory, master of its own fate and hostage to its worst instincts.
Substitution of materials, equipment and low carbon fuels for high carbon fuels is underway and moving forward faster in some countries and economic sectors than others. Substitution of manufactured equipment for fuels adds “life cycle carbon” to historical and on-going GHG emissions. To what extent do GHGs emitted in creating low carbon energy economies retard overall decarbonization progress? Life cycle carbon emissions for the years 2020 through 2029 add up to a minimum of 35 billion metric tons of CO2-eq, or roughly a year’s worth of current global energy related GHG emissions. Overall life cycle carbon emissions will continue to increase after 2029 at least until direct global GHG emissions are brought under control.