For 100 years, electricity systems have been planned, built, owned and operated from the top down. This structure has yielded lucrative profits for investors and executives, while regulators keep ratepayers captive to the monopoly utilities.
Today there’s an urgent need to invert this pyramid — to plan, build, own and operate electricity resources from the bottom up, in order to meet critical needs for community resilience, energy justice and achieve liberation from fossil fuels.
Arriving just at the perfect moment to enable an equitable bottom-up energy transition are distributed energy resource (DER) technologies. These are proving to be powerful, versatile and cost-effective.
All that’s standing in the way is an array of obsolete statutes and regulations designed to protect the investor-owned monopolies. This presentation will offer a strategy framework for a customer- and community-focused transition to clean local electricity.
Our presenter this month was Lorenzo Kristov, independent consultant working on state and national policy to enable locally-owned and operated electricity systems to proliferate and thrive. He was formerly Principal in Lorenzo adds to his decades of expertise a deep “desire to advance the transition to community-based energy systems…for the well-being of the generations of children who will inherit the results of our actions”.
This presentation will be followed by a separate discussion call Thursday, February 1, 12-1:00. The discussion call, like this Statewide Presentation, is open to members of the Alliance only. The recording of this presentation is available here (opens in YouTube) with the slides available separately.
You can access all CACE videos at our YouTube channel, here.