In a report released last month, energy systems researchers Chris Clack, Aditya Choukulkar, Brianna Coté, and Sarah A McKee, at Vibrant Clean Energy consulting, present a model calculating that
...the cheapest way to reduce emissions actually involves building 247 gigawatts of rooftop and local solar power [and storage] (equal to about one-fifth of the country’s entire generating capacity today). In this scenario, consumers would save $473 billion [over the next 30 years], relative to what electricity would otherwise cost…
This contrasts with paying $385 billion more for power across that time period, with traditional models favoring traditional grids fed by large solar and wind farms, like the kind shown here….<big><big>⟶</big></big>
<big>...which are no protection against the harms, costs and losses that people endure from power outages that traditional huge grids are increasingly and drastically vulnerable to in one or more sectors.</big>
The wildfires in California caused by PG&E’s electricity transmission and grid fails alone —not counting lightning strikes, arson, etc., nor other energy supply system failures— and the prolonged power outages that resulted in areas both large and small, comprise a living rather than theoretical model of forty million people poorly served and catastrophically endangered by traditional power transmission and distribution in America.
And while roof-top solar will nicely do for families and businesses that can afford it —just as they can afford financial accounts for emergencies and for retirement and so on— their very ability to afford it relieves them of most incentives to give a damn about lives on budgets tight to the choking point, for whom no significant emergency survival resources exist.
I’ve read that the president-elect has a $2-trillion climate plan that includes supporting renewable power and puts pressure on fossil fuels. I don’t know much about it, but I would guess that it might be a bit traditional in the thinking.
It would be great to be wrong, of course. Hopefully that plan will incentivize well-off and rich individuals, businesses, and organizations to put their clout behind local grid construction (including storage equipment / battery arrays) and behind provision of rooftop and available landscape and cityscape solar paneling to poor and low-income and moderately-low-income neighborhoods, communities, farms, villages and towns.
But since DK is a progressive site, yet with few diaries on how to let the huge population swath of poor, low income, and moderately-low income Americans (and their schools, workplaces, community and govermental facilities, etc) be assets to climate change through more reliable and safe alternative energy generation, transmission, and distribution supplied to them, I fear that ideas thinking from the top down, rather than the bottom up, will prevail as usual.
Even if it’s known that funding goes much further when thought from the bottom up.
Hoping commenters have encouraging information and links to add that can be edited into this diary. Meanwhile these might be of interest: