16 December 2021
Fourth Quarter Newsletter
Friends,

Amidst mixed COP26 results, supply chain woes, and the questionable outcome of the Build Back Better Act, it’s important to remember that clean energy continues to make major advances.

However, it’s also clear that the Clean Coalition’s mission of accelerating the transition to renewable energy and a modern grid is more crucial than ever. To achieve our mission, we need to take significant action — including facilitating renewables-driven Solar Microgrids and Community Microgrids, which bring our communities an unparalleled trifecta of economic, environmental, and resilience benefits. 

The Clean Coalition has partnered with Los Angeles County to unleash Solar Microgrids and Community Microgrids in the County. As the first step in this collaboration, the Clean Coalition will perform Solar Microgrid feasibility studies for a hub of three critical community facilities (CCFs) clustered in the disadvantaged and unincorporated East LA community.
LA County’s ultimate goal is to implement Solar Microgrids and Community Microgrids throughout the County. As such, the Solar Microgrid feasibility studies for the East LA hub are intended to be translated into a Request for Proposals (RFP) that leads to robust Solar Microgrid implementations within the next two years. The East LA Solar Microgrids are intended to showcase Solar Microgrids that can be proliferated to CCFs throughout LA County and beyond.
Our work on microgrid projects informs our policy actions, and in 2021, the Clean Coalition continued progressing policies to facilitate Solar Microgrids and Community Microgrids, including by designing policies and market mechanisms that allow straightforward implementation via the California Public Utilities Commission, the California Independent System Operator, and other jurisdictional authorities.
A key policy innovation is our value-of-resilience methodology, VOR123, which makes it straightforward to value resilience for any facility. This year we refined and validated VOR123 — which can also be applied to a larger grid area by tiering facilities as well as loads:
Based on VOR123, we developed a straightforward market mechanism to facilitate the financing and expansion of Community Microgrids, the Resilient Energy Subscription (RES). RES allows any facility within the footprint of a Community Microgrid to pay a simple, transparent fee on top of its normal electricity tariff for guaranteed daily delivery of locally generated renewable energy during grid outages — ensuring unparalleled energy resilience. The RES fee covers the cost of service of provisioning such energy resilience from a Community Microgrid.
Facilitating projects and proposing policy fixes is not enough. To achieve the Clean Coalition’s mission, it’s crucial to raise awareness about work that’s progressing clean local energy.
This year, the Clean Coalition hosted and presented at numerous webinars. Several of these webinars featured studies from the Local Solar for All Coalition, based on results from the most comprehensive electricity system modeling that has ever been conducted, thanks to the tremendous work from Vibrant Clean Energy. The unparalleled modeling clearly shows that significantly increasing local solar+storage, in coordination with increasing utility-scale renewables, can save Americans hundreds of billions while transitioning to a renewable energy future.
Support from foundations, donor-advised funds, and individuals allows us to continue our work. This year, the Clean Coalition was honored to be included in The Giving List, the philanthropic publication of the Montecito Journal Media Group. Through this effort, the Clean Coalition is seeking support to help us safeguard communities throughout California and beyond with Solar Microgrids and Community Microgrids.
In addition, the Clean Coalition recently became one of the first clean energy nonprofits to accept cryptocurrency donations, which provides natural alignment between decentralized finance and decentralized energy. Crypto donations that support clean local energy will help ensure that the energy required for crypto networks is increasingly clean and resilient — essentially providing local solar offsets for energy-related emissions.
Thank you for continuing to support the Clean Coalition in pursuit of our 25 x 25 vision, which is to ensure that from 2025 onward, at least 25% of newly added electricity generation capacity in the US will come from local renewable energy sources.

We wish you a happy holiday season and look forward to even greater successes in 2022, and beyond.

Sincerely,

Craig Lewis
Founder and Executive Director
Santa Barbara | Menlo Park
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