EPC to Maximise the Positive Social Impacts of Green Energy Procurement

Companies must seek to partner with developers that create shared value with local communities to maximize the positive social impacts of green energy procurement.

FREMONT, CA: The move to a green and decarbonised economy is being driven by renewable energy. However, adding more wind and solar power facilities is insufficient. Sustainable development goals emphasise the importance of these facilities delivering more than just clean energy. They must also implement best practices that have additional positive effects on the ecosystems around them in both an environmental and social sense.

It will be necessary for the electric power sector to have infrastructure, rules, and procedures that support and stimulate the development of cost-effective, more clean energy technology. To create such a power sector, the power system will need to undergo technological changes, and the regulation and management of electric power utilities would need to undergo fundamental changes. Power systems, or the networks that deliver and transmit electricity, will need to be able to incorporate new technologies more readily. To achieve this, authorities must put into place laws that encourage utilities to fully engage in innovation and the demonstration of new technologies, as well as access to the transmission and delivery systems that are reasonable and non-discriminatory.

To enable the truly widespread adoption of increasingly clean power technologies, significant changes in utility technical, business, and regulatory models are required. These changes are required in response to the growth of renewable and distributed energy resources, the expansion of energy-efficiency programs, slowly increasing or declining utility sales, low natural gas prices, and the need to invest in the grid to maintain its reliability and security. However, the industry is only beginning to assess these transformations. The development of new technologies and the entry of new enterprises are hampered by the utility industry's current technical, business, and regulatory models, particularly when it comes to distributed and variable generation technologies. The emphasis in this article is largely on distribution and distributed and variable resources, with some treatment of transmission. The transmission and delivery systems are both intricate and present numerous opportunities as well as obstacles.

Electric utilities are established businesses that frequently have conservative cultures. The ability of utilities to embrace innovation and fully support the adoption of cost-effective, increasingly clean energy and energy-efficiency technologies that can provide net value to customers is likely to depend on well-aligned incentives and the involvement of policymakers, regulators, and external stakeholders. The constraints of the conventional cost-of-service paradigm for regulating vertically integrated electric utilities and power distribution are discussed in this subsection. The alternatives are laid out in cases where deploying sophisticated, increasingly clean energy and energy-efficient technology would benefit society and utility customers and utilities more generally.

Check Out This: Utilities Business Review