One of CETI’s primary program areas is Community-Defined Decarbonization, where we examine barriers to decarbonizing Washington state’s rural low-income, energy-burdened households and work to understand rural community views about how decarbonization and clean energy development might address energy inequity.  

This is not a well-researched area, and we are working hard to learn all we can both qualitatively and quantitatively about how rural communities can define the clean energy transition on their terms. The following are some of the best podcasts that shed light on this nuanced aspect of decarbonization.

Rural Communities and Renewable Energy Projects

David Roberts of Volts’ podcast on What rural people actually think about clean energy (Volts, 11/8/23) was quite helpful as he talked with Mike Casey of Tigercomm and Robin Pressman of Embold Research about a survey they designed to learn how 2,645 rural Americans thought about renewable energy.

A top-level takeaway is that there is more support for renewable energy than opposition, which hovered between 10-25%, depending upon how close a project was to the respondent. At the same time, there is considerable work to be done to enable rural communities to determine how the projects might get sited to be a benefit to them, and not just to the project developer or to those who will receive the electricity that is produced but often live far away from the project itself.

Rooftop Solar and Distributed Energy Resources

Distributed energy, such as rooftop solar, is a potential solution for rural communities. We paid particular attention to several pods on this topic last year as they inform our work on the project we have with a University of Washington Population Health Initiative grant examining benefits of distributed solar for Washington’s rural areas.

Roberts was very focused on this topic in 2023 and we found several of his pods helpful:

• In Getting rooftop solar onto low- and middle-income housing (Volts, 4/28/23), Roberts talked with Vero Bourg-Meyer of the Clean Energy States Alliance about why so few lower- and middle-income homes are able to install rooftop solar and how to overcome the challenges, potentially with Inflation Reduction Act funds.
• With How to accelerate rooftop solar and household batteries in the US (Volts, 9/15/2023), we heard the powerhouse Mary Powell, who was a clean energy pioneer at Green Mountain Power in Vermont before taking the helm as CEO of Sunrun, talk about all aspects of rooftop solar.

Early in the year, we took note of Shayle Kann’s The journey to monetizing distributed energy resources (Catalyst, 1/26/23). Kann explored how “controllable devices”—which include thermostats, fridges, and batteries, among others—could work together to reduce load when there is not enough electricity supply to meet demand, ease transmission congestion, and maintain grid frequency. Grid operators can control these devices, which are called distributed energy resources (DERs), remotely.

Toward the end of 2023, in The market for microgrids (Catalyst, 10/27/23) Kann talked about how microgrids can help ease demands on the electricity grid as more and more end uses are electrified. Microgrids are electrical networks that can function independently from the larger grid and can help ease challenges that the main grid experiences with transmission congestion, interconnection delays, and extreme weather events that take the grid down.

While DERs and microgrids are key to addressing these grid challenges, CETI also looks at the value they can provide to rural and Tribal communities to provide electricity where it does not exist, resilience against frequent power outages in far flung areas, and energy independence/sovereignty.

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Next up in the this ‘Decarbcast’ series, some good listens to better understand markets, siting, and transmission. Stay tuned.