In addition to helping the environment, clean energy projects have community benefits such as reducing bills, generating new jobs, providing more reliable power, and more.
Cost Benefits
Generating renewable energy within the community where it’s used can cut costs because it avoids the expensive and inefficient transmission of power long-distance. Massive transmission infrastructure, which is required to transfer energy from power plants to distant communities, is expensive to build, site, and maintain.
Clean energy providers are also working toward helping community members lower bills by finding creative ways to limit power usage. Consumers Energy, for example, works directly with local community members and individual households to find areas where their energy output could be reduced, thereby saving the consumer monthly costs and benefiting the environment by helping to conserve energy.
Resiliency & Reliability
As the system of centralized power plants is vulnerable to outages from severe weather conditions or human error, local clean energy increases energy security by providing a more resilient grid. Smaller, decentralized power plants diversify the energy supply, reducing the risk of widespread blackouts. Additionally, clean local energy can come online more rapidly than big, centralized energy generation, which can often take years to develop.
Boosting Local Economies
Developing local clean energy sources creates more jobs within the community than traditional power plants. Project labor agreements result in tax breaks for developers and offshore wind developers also invest in workforce development as part of their bids to win contracts. This keeps financial resources within the community and gives local residents, institutions, and businesses a means to entrepreneurship in the growing clean energy economy.
A 2014 report showed that 1 MW (megawatt) of locally owned solar means as much as $5.7 million in lifetime economic benefits for a community. Local community and tribal project hosts can also be granted an economic stake in renewable energy projects.
Tune in to Science Channel to watch Energy Transfer at 10 AM EST on Saturday, December 14!
