Decarbonizing the U.S. Economy by 2050: A National Blueprint for the Buildings Sector

The U.S. Department of Energy led the development of a Blueprint for decarbonizing U.S. buildings by 2050 to lay out a national strategy for aggressively reducing building greenhouse gas emissions while delivering equity, affordability, and resilience benefits to communities. The vision includes action the federal government can take to meet specific targets for increasing building energy efficiency, accelerating onsite emissions reductions, transforming the grid edge, and minimizing embodied life cycle emissions.

The national strategy reflects the central role that buildings play in achieving economy-wide climate goals while delivering cost savings, healthier environments, and high-quality jobs for the American people. Federal …

Generator Interconnection Scorecard

Currently, over one million megawatts of generator and storage projects are actively seeking to connect to the U.S. transmission grid. The various grid interconnection processes across the nation have been slow and received criticism from a wide range of stakeholders for being dysfunctional. The 2024 Advanced Energy United Generator Interconnection Scorecard evaluates the outcomes and processes of the generator interconnection process across the seven U.S. regional grid operators (the RTOs/ISOs), finding some bright spots and room for significant improvement.

Now that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has issued Order No. 2023 requiring RTOs/ISOs to implement reforms to the interconnection process, …

Technical Potential and Meaningful Benefits of Community Solar in the United States

Community solar is any solar project or purchasing program within a geographic area in which the benefits flow to multiple customers, such as individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and other groups. Community solar customers typically subscribe to or own a portion of the energy generated by a solar array and receive an electric bill credit for electricity generated by their share of the community solar system. Community solar can offer greater household savings for electricity customers, provide access to solar energy for low- to moderate-income (LMI) customers, generate resilience and grid benefits, and boost solar workforce development, among other benefits.1 The goal …

Rooftop Solar on the Rise

Solar energy is abundant, affordable and a big part of America’s transition to renewable energy. Solar power is particularly valuable when it produces energy right where we need it: on the rooftops of our homes and businesses.
Rooftop solar is good for the environment and consumers – reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, easing strain on the grid during periods of high demand, increasing resilience to threats like extreme weather, and limiting the amount of land needed for clean energy, all at steadily falling cost.
State and local policies that make it easier for homeowners and business owners to install …

Fostering Collaboration Would Help Build Needed Transmission

It is a national priority to expand transmission capacity on the nation’s bulk power system
to improve grid reliability and resilience and deliver clean, low-cost power to consumers.
Building such transmission is notoriously difficult; however, numerous instances of successful
transmission expansion prove that it is possible. Given the challenges of developing electric
transmission and the need for infrastructure expansion in the coming decades, it is especially
critical to learn from hard-earned experience in terms of what drives success. Other reports
have noted the importance of well-tailored transmission planning, permitting, and cost
allocation policies to drive investment in the high-voltage grid. …

Unlocking U.S. Transmission Upgrades – Are We On the Cusp of Real Progress?

In recent decades, the U.S. has not been able to construct the volume of high-voltage backbone transmission facilities needed to support the country’s move to a ‘greener’ power system. The fact remains, though, that power generation infrastructure in the U.S. is changing fast with the growth of technologies including solar and wind power generation, as well as energy storage. Facilitating that change will require a grid that is able to reliably and cost-effectively deliver power to users. The inability to build backbone transmission infrastructure thwarts customer demands for a ‘greener’ power mix.
This report offers perspectives from a range of …

The State of Bidirectional Charging in 2023

Bidirectional charging has significant potential in transforming how consumers view and use their electric vehicles (EVs). Bidirectional charging allows EVs to become a flexible resource for power systems. At high rates of adoption, EVs can have significant impacts on coincident- system and feeder-level peaks. To mitigate these load impacts, utilities and EV charging site hosts often utilize a variety of managed charging solutions to optimize EV charging. As part of the continuum of managed charging solutions, bidirectional charging creates an opportunity for EVs to be used as an energy resource and to discharge back to the grid. Bidirectional charging’s ability …

Don’t Overlook Your Aging Substations

Substations are a key part of every utility’s infrastructure, but their quiet dependability makes them a vulnerable part of the power grid. They work until they don’t. When a utility only services substations after a fault or outage, they should expect long, slow, and expensive repairs along with frustrated rate payers.

Regular assessment and preventative maintenance is key to substation resilience, and can ensure that the substations your customers count on keep running with no interruptions. Ensuring that substations and other transmission infrastructure are properly maintained is key to reduced total cost of ownership and customer value creation.…

Hydropower Value Drivers

In April 2019, WPTO launched the HydroWIRES Initiative to understand, enable, and improve hydropower and pumped storage hydropower’s (PSH’s) contributions to reliability, resilience, and integration in the rapidly evolving U.S. electricity system. The unique characteristics of hydropower, including PSH, make it well suited to provide a range of storage, generation flexibility, and other grid services to support the cost-effective integration of variable renewable resources. The U.S. electricity system is rapidly evolving, bringing both opportunities and challenges for the hydropower sector. While increasing deployment of variable renewables such as wind and solar have enabled low-cost, clean energy in many U.S. regions, …

Winter Storm Elliott: Event Analysis and Recommendation Report

Winter Storm Elliott hit the eastern United States over the Dec. 23–25 weekend and tested the reliability of much of the Eastern Interconnection. Precipitous temperature drops and powerful winds caused widespread generator failures and froze up natural gas supplies while driving up electricity demand, leading to power outages in some of PJM’s neighbors.

PJM and its members were able to maintain the reliability of the system, serve customers and even support neighboring systems during some periods, which was a significant accomplishment. Specifically, PJM operators were able to avoid electricity interruptions throughout this event. Nevertheless, PJM operators had to implement multiple …