Long distance energy transport of solar energy from sun to earth via photons ("radiative transport") costs nothing and delivers energy everywhere on the earth's surface. As a result solar heat and electricity can be produced close to where they are needed and used. Photons are packets of energy that travel at the "speed of light". They have a much longer and more fundamentally important energy transport track record than electricity wires and gas lines. Arriving from the sun and absorbed in the coating of a solar panel, a photon's energy can be converted to electricity or heat for buildings and other local uses. Capturing and converting photons locally saves costs of delivering energy via wires and pipes. (1)
Balance and integration are keys to timely energy sector decarbonization. Decarbonization requires that existing power plant fleets be infused with renewable sources to decarbonize current electricity demand. But what about new electricity demand driven by electric vehicle adoption, data center proliferation and electrification of building heating and cooling? Over the next decades, electricity demand will increase to levels that are a factor of two to three in many US states. This means that, as existing power plant fleets are updated and decarbonized to supply current demand, new demand will be most affordably, promptly and appropriately met with a combination of:
Decentralized solar and battery storage capacity located within communities and/or connected directly to buildings circuits;
More integrative, real time building energy management; and
Microgrids that enable excess decentralized supply in one location to be combined with limited decentralized supply in other nearby locations.
Ideally, wires, pipes and photons would all team up to decarbonize our energy use at the least cost and as fast as possible. At present in the US they do not, at least not yet, because local solar electricity producers and enablers (homes, businesses, communities and microgrid owners) are not yet compensated fairly, if at all, for avoided costs of medium and long distance transport (2). Absent fair compensation, building and vehicle solar energy supply and use will not be nearly as economically efficient, environmentally responsible or climate appropriate as possible. While total reliance on locally produced solar energy is neither necessary or optimum, there is an urgent need for a much broader base of solar electricity supply than can be quickly, conveniently and affordably met by solar and wind power plants.
Energy transport utilities have an essential role but must adapt. Energy utilities, founded and operated in the past as monopolies, have served the US well. They are the product of a massive societal investment in human and organizational talent and expertise and in existing electricity transport infrastructure on which a timely global energy transition depends. They can continue to provide essential services, but as an enabler of, not an alternative to, local investment in capturing photons and other renewable energy carriers and converting them to electricity for local use.
N.B. The new reality of affordable locally produced solar energy means that energy transport via wires and pipes is no longer a "natural" monopoly. Energy transport law and policy must now recognize and adapt to this fundamental change.
Locally governed utilities may be the first adapt in order to deliver cost savings to their communities, but "Investor owned" energy transport utilities (aka IOUs) will not adapt unless energy regulation adapts. IOU profits are still indexed to investments in wires, not to the IOU's success in reducing energy costs and decarbonizing energy use. Under current utility economic regulation, shortening physical transport distances (zero in the case of rooftop solar) reduces a for-profit electric utility's opportunity to invest in and profit from owning wires and related infrastructure. So, for-profit electric utilities still purchase far more solar electricity from power plants than from smaller local sources. This is a prescription for slow, unnecessarily costly and incomplete electricity supply decarbonization…
…and it is time for for-profit energy service to be accountable to Main Street as well as to Wall Street. (3) Wall Street looks for investment opportunities and attractive returns on investment. Like the utilities it invests in, Wall Street's focus is money. This will not change. Therefore, energy utility regulation administered by states will not change. While Main Street cares about money, too, it is also focused on its children and grandchildren. Climate change poses a threat to them as well as to future generations. As the threat escalates, Main Street increasingly looks to mitigate it through investments in rooftop solar, community solar, energy efficiency, energy conservation and in ways of restoring and sustaining local services in the wake of disasters.
It is possible to empower Main Street without significantly inconveniencing Wall Street. For example, by:
No longer suppressing local solar electricity production as if eventually decarbonizing current "utility scale" generation capacity will suffice to electrify current petroleum and natural gas use. It will not. (4)
Instead, starting to plan, equip and operate electricity "distribution" systems as integrated supply and delivery systems. This step has been extensively analyzed and modeled since the mid-1980s but its implementation has been limited primarily to community microgrids. (5)
Compensating rooftop solar and electric vehicle owners for the fair economic value of electricity they feed into local grids, i.e., what their neighbors are charged for it.
Charging owners of community solar and battery storage projects a fair price for the use of local grids to deliver and exchange electricity.
Meeting the need outlined above with a balanced mix of low carbon electricity supply from 1) large solar, wind and battery power plants, 2) smaller solar and battery power plants in and around cities, and 3) solar arrays on buildings and parking structures.
Summary. Mature, mass produced solar technologies deliver cost savings by avoiding fossil fuel use, and, in the case of rooftop and community solar, by avoiding a portion of the cost of energy transport system expansion. So, radiative solar energy transport should be maximized because it is cheaper, faster to deploy, and more environmentally and climate beneficial than transport via wires and pipes. Of course, politics will determine whether radiative solar transport is fully exploited. Fortunately, the relevant decisions are (or should be) primarily local ones.
(1) The main cost of energy delivered via wires and pipes is the initial cost of the wires and pipes plus the cost of financing their purchase. In most cases, the cost of purchasing energy commodities is less than the cost of purchasing wires and pipes, paying for them over time and keeping them in good repair.
(3) Ref: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619015001104
(4) Ref: https://www.iresn.org/s/The-Case-for-Solar-Decarbonization.pdf
(5) Utilities have capacity but not motivation. Communities have motivation but not capacity. States should consider incenting collaboration between the two.