Clean Energy to Communities Program: In-Depth Partnerships

Through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Clean Energy to Communities (C2C) program, NREL offers in-depth technical partnerships that support communities in developing secure, reliable, resilient, equitable, and affordable clean energy systems.

Illustration of molecules connected together in a star-shaped pattern.

In-depth technical partnerships help communities develop a realistic, validated plan to put clean energy ambitions into action and address key energy challenges. These partnerships offer teams—composed of local government, community-based organizations, electric utilities, and other key organizations that can represent the community—the chance to work alongside national laboratory staff to apply robust modeling and analysis tools and conduct hardware-in-the-loop testing of solutions adapted to the community's unique conditions and contexts. This multiyear partnership allows local decision makers to evaluate and test potential scenarios and strategies in their energy transition before full technology deployment, thereby lowering risks to implementation.

Communities selected for in-depth partnerships have:

  • A dedicated point of contact within the national lab system
  • Direct subcontract funding to support staff or consultants
  • Facilitation and community engagement support
  • Extensive technical support from the DOE national laboratory complex.

C2C in-depth technical partnerships focus broadly on cross-sectoral issues related to renewable energy, mobility, and buildings. Energy security, resilience, and disaster preparedness—as well as energy equity and environmental justice—are also considered.

Text version

C2C worked with Golden Valley Electric Association in Fairbanks, Alaska, to evaluate and de-risk its transition to clean energy options in a partnership that helped shape the current in-depth partnership offering.

Selected Community Teams

Standard In-Depth Partnerships

Teams selected for current C2C in-depth partnerships are in these communities.

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, Commonwealth Edison, and Respiratory Health Association aim to refine tools and analyses to help reach net-zero transportation emissions by 2050. These improved tools will help the region better understand opportunities and challenges from implementing low-carbon transportation technologies, including passenger and freight travel electrification and energy-efficient mobility options, while assessing cross-sectoral interactions with the grid.
The City of Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs Utilities, Energy Resource Center, the Housing & Building Association of Colorado Springs, and Careers in Construction Colorado seek to validate concepts that aggregate power across complex energy systems, including virtual power plants. This will support the deployment of large amounts of solar, grid-connected buildings, electric vehicles (EVs), and other distributed resources.
The City of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh's Department of City Planning, Duquesne Light Co., and the Green Building Alliance plan deploy Smart Electric Energy Districts as part of a comprehensive approach to achieving a clean and affordable electricity system. These districts are comprised of "smart" energy infrastructure—such as rooftop solar, appliances, buildings, energy storage, and EV chargers—and can work together to meet both grid and community needs throughout the city and surrounding areas.
The City and Borough of Sitka, City and Borough of Sitka Electric Department, Renewable Energy Alaska Project, and Mt. Edgecumbe High School aim to optimize their existing hydropower generation as well as planned solar, wind, and storage projects. They will also explore the potential to use clean energy to produce ammonia, which could be exported and help lower energy costs and emissions for local families and businesses.

Energyshed In-Depth Partnerships

Teams selected for current Energyshed in-depth partnerships are in these communities.

The Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, Philadelphia Electric Co., Bucks County Opportunity Council, Community Action Agency of Delaware County, and the Community Action Development Commission of Montgomery County aim to identify the most impactful clean energy solutions for the Delaware Valley region and create a Regional Clean Energy Activation Hub that will help facilitate and streamline procurement for identified technologies across its 200+ municipalities.
The Hawaii State Energy Office, Hawaiian Electric, Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative Molokai, Moloka'i Clean Energy Hui, and Shake Energy Collaborative aims to develop and validate a portfolio of renewable energy generation projects that meets 100% of Molokaʻi's electricity needs while supporting community values.

Timeline

Sign up for C2C email updates to be notified when program applications open.

Frequently Asked Questions

Topics eligible for support through an in-depth technical partnerships could include but are not limited to:

  • How might demand for electricity change with more adoption of energy technologies such as electric vehicles and rooftop solar?
  • Does reaching clean energy goals mean big changes locally—such as building new transmission lines or power plants?
  • How can a community make sure that the new system is reliable under extreme events such as fires and heat waves?
  • What does achieving clean energy goals mean for jobs, air quality, health, the local economy, and environmental justice?
  • What are the costs of a clean electricity grid in the region, and what are the quantified benefits?

The concept of an "Energyshed" is loosely analogous to that of a watershed. Energyshed considers energy loads, sources of generation, and transmission and distribution networks within a broad footprint. Similar to a watershed, an Energyshed includes multiple closely-coupled, adjacent geographic areas, communities, electric utilities, coordinating bodies, and/or jurisdictions. For example, an urban Energyshed could consist of multiple jurisdictions across a metro area with interconnected energy networks such as electricity, transportation, and heating. A rural Energyshed could consist of neighboring rural communities who host energy clean infrastructure that supports local and/or distant loads. Energyshed represents a valuable framework for considering how to achieve locally-driven clean energy goals while ensuring that communities who are most impacted by clean energy investment decisions benefit in an equitable way. Energyshed allows consideration of both community-specific needs and challenges as well as the broader energy landscape. It can also illustrate and improve how benefits and impacts of energy systems are shared across and between geographical areas, ultimately leading to more resilient, affordable, and equitable decarbonized energy systems.

The in-depth partnerships using an Energyshed focus bring the benefits of the general in-depth partnerships but with an emphasis on addressing challenges unique to two specific geographies.

Rural communities face energy challenges that are often distinct from areas of greater population density. Population decline, rapid changes in the energy landscape, and infrastructure miles needed to serve relatively small populations create unique conditions for long-term, regional energy planning. This partnership seeks to better understand and address these issues for a specific rural region.

Metro areas across the U.S. are seeing rapid changes in energy generation and use—from rapid electrification of buildings and transportation to increasing deployment of rooftop solar and other distributed energy resources. These advancements are changing the characteristics of local electricity grids and the resources needed to manage them. Efficiently and equitably modernizing these systems involves decision-making across multiple, often overlapping, jurisdictions. This partnership seeks to better understand and address these issues for a metro-area region, with a focus on ensuring that benefits of a cost-effective, resilient grid are equally distributed across the community.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Integrated planning assessment (looking out 10–20 years) with a cross-sectoral approach that jointly considers grid, mobility, and buildings (including electrification of transportation and buildings) across the bulk and distribution systems as well as hardware validation
  • Procedural and distributional justice related to energy siting in rural areas, or other elements related to energy equity and energy justice, that are embedded within a technical assessment of future Energyshed systems.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Development of strategies to ensure resilience and reliability of building systems to withstand events such as natural disasters so that communities may safely ride out service interruptions
  • Development of visualization dashboards to demonstrate energy interactions across multiple energy sectors (grid, transportation, and buildings) in a metro area
  • Emulation of a community grid, including thousands of connected devices, to understand and demonstrate different communication and control strategies (This emulation could include real-time pricing and weather impacts to understand responsive demand.)
  • Analysis of rate design for grid benefits and energy equity, with consideration of the distribution of benefits across jurisdictional boundaries
  • Distribution grid operational planning, including demand response and distributed energy resources
  • Distribution system controls design and validation, including device-level controls of distributed energy resources
  • Development of strategies to decarbonize the building sector through a combination of energy efficiency measures; electrification of end uses; demand-side management; and distributed energy resources such as solar power, battery storage, and building control systems.

Other Program Support

See other C2C program offerings.

Contact

If you have questions about the in-depth partnerships or the C2C program, email C2C@nrel.gov.

Share