Clean Energy Offers Consumers’ Savings, Health and Resilience Benefits
Clean energy offers many benefits to consumers, including reducing consumers’ electricity bills, lowering total electricity system costs, and providing health and resilience benefits. States can accelerate consumers' access to these benefits with policies that support energy efficiency, demand flexibility, renewable energy and storage. Berkeley Lab developed a series of briefs that explore the consumer benefits of clean energy, and identify actions states can take to promote them.
The first and second briefs in the series discuss how low-cost resources like energy efficiency and renewable energy keep electricity system costs lower, compared to a system without these resources. Berkeley Lab’s most recent analysis of utility energy efficiency data found that more than 70 percent of the 2021 annual energy savings cost less than the lowest levelized cost for electricity generation (utility-scale solar photovoltaics (PV) and onshore wind at $0.029 and $0.027 per kilowatt-hour, respectively) (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Levelized Cost of Saved Electricity and Peak Demand
Similarly, utility-scale renewable energy continues to cost less than combined-cycle gas turbines, making it the lowest cost resources available, and costs for behind-the-meter solar PV continue to become more affordable (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Historical Installed Cost of Residential and Non-Residential Distributed PV through 2022
Electrification, the focus of the third brief in the series, is a foundational strategy for decarbonizing the economy. Berkeley Lab’s new analysis shows that efficiently electrifying 1 percent of residential water and space heating produces air quality and climate benefits in every region in the contiguous US, including accounting for the need for increased electricity generation. Benefits are significantly higher when installing very efficient heat pumps (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Lifetime Air Quality and Climate Benefits from Heat Pumps
Increasing frequency and magnitude of severe weather are leading many consumers to consider how to improve electricity reliability and resilience for their homes. The fourth brief in the Berkeley Lab series examines the capability of residential solar plus energy storage systems (PVESS) to mitigate long duration interruptions (Figure 4) and the resilience value of these systems for customers—with and without the federal renewable energy investment tax credit and Inflation Reduction Act incentives.
Figure 4. Annual expected loss of load without PVESS (A) and with PVESS (B)
The final publication in the series is for states interested in policies to support cost reductions and health and resilience benefits of clean electricity technologies. It summarizes the findings from four briefs, and focuses on examples of policy options for states to pursue to advance energy efficiency, demand flexibility, renewable energy and storage.
The primary authors of the series are Natalie Mims Frick, Sunhee Baik, Mark Bolinger, Juan Pablo Carvallo, Wanyu Chan, William Delp, Cesca Miller, Dev Millstein, Sean Murphy, Margaret Pigman and Lisa Schwartz. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Policy supported this work.