Clean Energy to Communities Program: In-Depth Partnerships

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.

See previous Energyshed-related initiatives from the U.S. Department of Energy:

From Watershed to Energyshed: Determining the Implications of Place-Based Generation Workshop

Energyshed—Exploring Place-Based Generation Funding Program.