Back in October, David Roberts at Vox gave readers an excellent look at the impacts of Renewable Portfolio Standards at the state level. It’s too bad he couldn’t have written about the federal RPS. But that would have been a short conversation. Because a nationwide RPS doesn’t exist.
Back in the 1990s and 2000s, when Democrats had more power in state governments, 29 states (and DC) passed some form of renewable portfolio standard (RPS), a policy that requires a state’s utilities to get a certain percentage of their power from renewable sources by a certain year.
Standards range from California’s wildly ambitious 50-percent-by-2030 to Ohio’s modest 12.5-percent-by-2026, and everywhere in between.
Though they aren’t as sexy as perpetually-discussed-but-rarely-passed carbon taxes, and they are flawed and insufficient in a number of ways, RPSs have been the quiet workhorses of renewable energy deployment in the US. According to one Lawrence Berkeley Lab report, fully 62 percent of the growth in US non-hydro renewables since 2000 has been undertaken to satisfy RPS requirements.
With the science deniers in the White House determined not to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, the state RPS are extremely important. Combined with ever-better, ever-cheaper technology as well as federal and state tax credits, the RPS are a big reason for the speed at which renewables installations are expanding.
If you look at that map above, and the map and the detailed state-by-state list on this webpage of the National Center for State Legislatures (NCSL), you can get a quick education which states have the best RPS (or RES—renewable energy standards) policies and which have the worst. Unfortunately, that last category includes 21 states that have no RPS policy at all. You can take a deeper dive by checking out the 40-page report from Galen Barbose at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory titled U.S. Renewables Portfolio Standards 2017 Annual Status Report. Lots of charts and graphs.
Three states have alternative energy portfolio standard (AEPS). While the standards in 29 states and DC are legally binding, eight other states just have targets that aren’t binding. The rules vary from state to state, but this approach, particularly in the absence of a federal RPS, is encouraging.
But with the exception of a handful of states—California, Hawaii, New York, Maine, Vermont—the RPS target percentages aren’t ambitious enough even though mandated RPS targets rose last year in DC, Maryland, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Oregon.
Every indication we’re getting is that the climate change is happening faster than expected. And that the International Panel on Climate Change’s computer-modeled scenarios showing the most extreme outcomes are the most likely to occur. It is not too hard to imagine that even those extremes will be even worse than the worst-case scenario now on the books.
Scientists don’t know how great the change in climate will be. Nor do they know whether transforming the world’s energy system will allow us to escape some of the worst predicted impacts. What they and we do know is that if we don’t work as quickly to make the switch, climate change impacts will be worse.
For that reason, climate activists and their allies should push Democrats to adopt a strong federal RPS, lobby state legislatures to increase their RPS if they have one, encourage states with voluntary RPS policies to make them mandatory, spur the 13 states which don’t have any RPS to get with the program. We should also push to make as many installations as possible community owned. For example, “community solar” designed right means lower-income people and people living in situations where they can’t themselves install solar can benefit from the energy transformation.
All lobbying, pushing, spurring and encouraging will be a lot of work. But it’s essential. And there is no excuse for waiting. Delay is, after all, just a passive-aggressive form of climate science denial.
Below are three summaries of summaries of RES or RPS from the NCSL:
Colorado
- Title: Renewable Energy Standard.
- Established: 2004.
- Requirement: 30 percent by 2020 (IOUs); 10 percent or 20 percent for municipalities and electric cooperatives depending on size.
- Applicable Sectors: Investor owned utility, municipal utilities, cooperative utilities.
- Cost Cap: 2.0 percent.
- Details: Distributed Generation: 3 percent of IOU retail sales by 2020, 1 percent of cooperative retail sales by 2020 (for those providing service to 10,000 or more meters) or 0.75 percent of cooperative retail sales by 2020 (for those providing service to less than 10,000 meters). The state has several credit multipliers for different technologies.
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South Carolina
- Title: Renewables Portfolio Standard.
- Established: 2014.
- Requirement: 2 percent by 2021.
- Applicable Sectors: Investor-owned utility.
- Details: Systems less than 1 MW: 1 percent of aggregate generation capacity, including at least 0.25 percent of total generation from systems less than 20kW. 1 – 10 MW facilities: 1 percent of aggregate generation capacity.
- Enabling Statute, Code or Order: House Bill 1189.
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VIRGINIA
- Title: Voluntary Renewable Energy Portfolio Goal.
- Established: 2007.
- Requirement: 15 percent by 2025.
- Applicable Sectors: Investor-owned utility.
- Details: The state has several credit multipliers for different technologies.
- Enabling Statute, Code or Order: Va. Code §56-585.2.