Goals for the Center for Advancing Community Electrification Solutions
The ACES vision centers on communities and on partnerships with stakeholders in a variety of areas to develop electrification pathways to achieving targeted goals for cost, water use, emissions, energy security and reliability, and grid efficiency. The broader goals include:
- Creating efficient energy generation, storage, and grid interface solutions to support community electrification.
- Developing data-driven control and grid integration solutions that enable electrification of communities while ensuring grid resilience and efficiency.
- Constructing coordinated policies that enable efficient electrification across three energy-intensive sectors that are common to all communities: water, buildings, and transportation.
Through these goals, we aim to enable energy independence and resilience for all kinds of communities by reducing time and risk while accelerating the impact of electrification.
The Challenges Ahead
For communities to receive the full benefits of electrification, they will need coordinated cross-sectoral solutions. These include reduced energy costs, lower total energy use, decreased emissions, and lessened water use. The Center for Community Electrifications Solutions will research pathways to develop these reductions in parallel with efforts to optimize and exploit the flexibility and efficiency for the power grid, improving energy security and reliability. This research and subsequent innovations can lead to advancements in community health, safety, and productivity.
Forward-looking electrification pathways must address technology and policy challenges in a range of sectors to deliver such gains. The Center for Advancing Community Electrification Solutions will work toward efficient electrification solutions to address:
Distributed (local) energy generation and storage needs;
The need for local grid flexibility, adaptation, and upgrades;
The development of analytical tools to assess regional and individual electrification project needs; and
The growth of policy solutions that coordinate across sectors with the goal of reducing adoption barriers and incorporating diverse user perspectives that are tailored to local socio-economics, environmental and health conditions, and cultural concerns.
In other words, the vast majority of these common challenges towards efficient electrification are also inherently local in nature. Thus, the Center for Advancing Community Electrification Solutions believes that cross-sectoral electrification pathways must be built at the community level, one community at a time, and scaled and expanded accordingly.
