One Step toward Reversing Global Warming
Founded in 2014, Project Drawdown is a nonprofit organization that seeks to help the world reach “drawdown”—a point in the future when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline. Project Drawdown presents one hundred steps toward a reversal of global warming. The following is one of them.
One advancement integral to the movement toward a cleaner environment would be establishing a distributed energy storage system, or an independent grid. This solution pertains to the ability to save a given amount of energy that is produced in each community to serve individual needs. A grid like this would provide the foundation for a system completely dependent upon renewable energy sources, which is the ultimate objective. While the sun and the wind supply only intermittent energy, distributed energy storage grants the public access to electricity when generation is unavailable.
This system would be constructed using two sources: stand-alone batteries and electrified vehicles. The system increases the reliability of renewable resources. In addition, distributed energy storage allows for greater support of other climate solutions, such as grid flexibility, microgrids, net-zero buildings, and rooftop solar energy systems. The batteries used for these developments have been prohibitively expensive in the past, but their price has gradually decreased in recent years (from $1,200 per kilowatt-hour in 2009 to $200 per KWh in 2016, with projections anticipating about $50 per KWh within a few years).
As we have seen throughout history, increased energy efficiency begets an increased demand. To prevent our energy consumption from expanding far beyond what it is now, we will need to implement constraints that allow us to bank the energy savings instead of indulging in greater usage. Distributed energy storage will become crucial as we move toward this more efficient energy supply. The localized energy storage that is part of the proposed systems will augment communities’ direct control over their energy intake while effectively and deliberately targeting their needs.
To read more about distributed energy storage, go to the Project Drawdown web page at https://drawdown.org/solutions/distributed-energy-storage.
—Celeste Edell, Natural Resources Committee
