25 by ’25: Getting the Priorities Right

A recent speech by ILSR Vice President, David Morris, focuses on ways to ensure that our nation's move to have 25 percent of our energy consumption come from renewable energy by 2025 will maximize the benefits to the communities in which these fuels are produced and harvested.

Morris said, “25 by ’25, by its very nature is a quantitative goal. Thus it is not surprising that most will view the challenge primarily as how to design rules that achieve this level of output. Yet we need to take into account qualitative goals as well. We need to strive not just for more, but for better."

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Growing Number of Universities Commit to Carbon Neutral Campuses

As of today, 111 college Presidents have signed on to an initiative, The American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, that commits their campuses to become carbon neutral. Second Nature, ecoAmerica and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) initiated the campaign to leverage the unique responsibility and leadership that institutions of higher education can have in addressing global warming at the local level.

This initiative is certainly only in the goal setting stage but the pledge being signed commits the campuses to act quickly and move as fast as possible to meet carbon neutral goals. We here at Democratic Energy hope that many more institutions get involved in this initiative. But we are keenly interested in seeing efforts by these schools to do as much as possible in terms of energy conservation and onsite renewable energy development before considering offsite CO2 offsets.

Presidents signing the Commitment are pledging to eliminate their campuses’ greenhouse gas emissions over time. This involves:

• Completing an emissions inventory
  
• Within two years, setting a target date and interim milestones for becoming climate neutral.
  
• Taking immediate steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by choosing from a list of short-term actions.
  
• Integrating sustainability into the curriculum and making it part of the educational experience.
  
• Making the action plan, inventory and progress reports publicly available.

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Distributed Generation Benefits Outlined in New DOE Report

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 required that DOE, in consultation with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), conduct a study of the potential benefits of cogeneration and small power production. The final report, The Potential Benefits of Distributed Generation and Rate Related Issues that May Impede Their Expansion, is now open for public comment until April 30, 2007.

The report was supposed to recommend a methodology for valuing the benefits of distributed generation (DG). DOE concluded that "This task is complicated somewhat because calculating DG benefits requires a complete dataset of the operational characteristics for a specific site, rendering the possibility of a single, comprehensive analysis tool, model, or methodology to estimate national or regional benefits highly improbable." The report examines evidence on the potential benefits of distributed generation in six areas:

• Increased Electric System Reliability
  
• Reducing Peak Power Requirements
  
• Ancillary service, including voltage support, regulation, operating reserve, and backup supply
  
• Improved Power Quality
  
• Reduce Land Use Effects and Rights-of-Way
  
• Reducing Vulnerability of the Electric System to Terrorism and Providing Infrastructure Resilience

DOE was also charged to analyze the impact of regulatory mandates, tariffs, rate structures and similar policies on the proliferation of distributed energy technologies. Consistent with many other studies, the DOE found that in many states across the country grid-connected DG is subject to a variety of rate-related and other impediments that can ultimately hinder the installation of DG units. These impediments result from regulations and rate making practices that have been in place for many years. In the vast majority of instances these rate making practices are under the jurisdiction of the states.

The most common rate-related impediments that affect DG owners and operators include the potential for lost revenue on the part of utilities, and practices such as standby charges, retail natural gas rates for wholesale applications, exit fees, and sell-back rates. There are several other rate-related issues that are somewhat less common; these include payments for locational marginal pricing, capacity payments, co-generation deferral rates, and remittance for line losses.

There are also several non-rate related impediments that affect the financial attractiveness of DG and these include interconnection charges, application and study fees, insurance and liability requirements, and untimely processing of interconnection requests.

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