Public preferences for five electricity grid decarbonization policies in California

Abstract

The climate crisis and associated push for distributed, renewable electricity generation necessitate policy changes to decarbonize and modernize the electricity grid. Some of these changes—e.g., smart meter rollouts and tax credits for solar panel adoption—have received attention in the media and from social scientists to understand public perceptions and responses. Others—e.g., allowing peer‐to‐peer electricity sales, promoting residential electrification, requiring solar panels on new development, funding microgrids, and paying customers to allow for utility control of electricity use—have received less attention. Here, we explore public perceptions of these understudied policies among California residents (n = 804), a state recognized for innovative energy policy. A majority of respondents supported only one of the policies—requiring solar panels on new development. Others elicited more indecision; few were strongly opposed. In general, male respondents and those with college degrees were more supportive of such policies, as were those more concerned about climate change and with a more open orientation to smart home technologies.

Trends in Renewable Electricity Generation in the G20 Countries: An Analysis of the 1990–2020 Period

“…As the predominance of electricity comes from hydroelectric plants, periods of drought can justify possible fluctuations in its production, which reinforces the country's need to diversify its production by investing in other renewable sources. Besides that, as the climate in the region is dependent on a series of conditions such as atmospheric pressure, air temperature, and humidity [47], solar power, for instance, can be affected by cloudiness and other factors [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. Nonetheless, despite the concern with climate change issues, there have been efforts towards diversifying the sources of renewable energy [49].…”

“…Denmark, for instance, has achieved remarkable success in renewable energy development over the last several decades, since the country mostly depends on wind energy [38], with 48% of its energy mix being from wind, [39]. Moreover, in the US, California is a state recognized for its innovative energy policy, mainly for the adoption of large amounts of solar panels in recent years [40]. Also in the US, [41] used life cycle assessment and revealed that deployment of renewable electricity generation devices to off-grid remote locations for electricity generation can have the same, or less, environmental impact as urban grid systems.…”

Constructing dynamic residential energy lifestyles using Latent Dirichlet Allocation

“…As smart meters become more ubiquitous in households across the world, new advances are needed to efficiently process the deluge of data streams produced from these devices and then generate actionable insights-especially in a way that has low computational overhead and does not require continuous human-in-the loop interactions [11]. In particular, using smart meter data to understand household level energy use is an ongoing challenge, and with it comes the difficulties in developing meaningful interventions that can ease burdens on the grid while maintaining customer engagement and satisfaction [12]. For example, one such motivation for household-level energy interventions is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from nonrenewable generation sources (e.g., natural gas "peaker" power plants) during periods of high demand, while also expanding the potential for customers to change their energy behaviors and appliance purchases to save money on their energy bills [13].…”