By Elisa Wood, Energy Changemakers
Household investment in energy is rising as consumers install more distributed energy resources (DERs) in their homes. This is one of several good economic signals for DERs we’ve picked up in recent reports.
Household share of energy investment has doubled since 2015 — largely due to those with higher incomes adopting rooftop solar, energy efficiency improvements, heat pumps, and electric vehicles, according to a report by the International Energy Agency.
Here are a few other encouraging metrics that indicate health in the distributed energy market:
- In New York, a good model for workable DER policies, distributed solar deployment is now outpacing utility-scale renewables, averaging 31% annual growth over the last decade. This growth has created 5.7 GW of distributed solar, including nearly 1 GW in 2023 alone. Community solar represents much of the growth.
- Research shows that household solar panels save money and reduce energy burden—the percentage of household income that goes toward energy bills. After evaluating 500,000 households, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that solar panels can generate a median savings of $691 a year. when all costs are considered. Solar reduced the rate of high or severe energy burden from 67% to 52% for all low-income households.
- Electric vehicles (EVs) appear to be an area where the federal government’s equity attempts are succeeding.?The Center for American Progress (CAP) analyzed 100 congressional districts and found that lower-income communities receive a large share of federal money for batteries and EV charging. About three-quarters of US EV battery and charger investment has occurred in communities with median household incomes below the national median of $74,755.
Read the full article on EnergyChangemakers.com.
Chair of the Board, TerraVerde Energy LLC
4 个月The trend is going the other direction in California…keep an eye out for major negative announcements from large solar and storage providers.
Founder | 89 Plus Energy, Energy & Engineering Consulting Services, Battery, Smart Grid, Climate Change, EV Charging, Solar and Wind, Power Plant, Energy Events Organizer in SouthEast Asia, GHG Green Business
4 个月Very helpful!
HOMR | Managing your house, but easy
4 个月I worry that this trend will exacerbate problems like the duckbill curve. Anyway to mitigate second and third-order impacts like this?
Clean energy and climate expert
4 个月And residential DER is only about a third of the DER pie. If you look at FERC’s mandated DR reports, as of last year we had about 32 GW of wholesale DR signed up with ISOs/RTOs, mostly C/I, and about 30 GW of retail DR, with res programs accounting for about a third. And we are still in early days for diversified DER with batteries and distributed RE adding to the resource mix.
Heat Pumps & more
4 个月interesting perspective. can you make a new word for "household energy investor"? we're a HEI, see graph. Phil Coupe Base Power is building a biz on this in TX