States in the U.S. don’t need to seek energy imports to meet their renewable energy goals. That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group that works with citizen groups, governments and private businesses in developing practices that extract the maximum value from local resources.
The report, "Energy Self-Reliant States" finds that almost the entire country west of the Mississippi and parts of the Eastern Seaboard (a total of 31 states) can serve all their electricity needs with in-state renewable power, and that every state could reach its renewable mandate with domestically available renewable resources.
“Renewable energy is available everywhere,” explains John Farrell, co-author and ILSR Senior Researcher. “This report shows the potential to harvest it economically in nearly every state.” The report shows that many states can reach their renewable energy goals without waiting for a controversial new nationwide, high-voltage transmission grid.
“Transmission advocates have suggested that East Coast states should welcome the opportunity to import cheap renewables from the Heartland–and should be happy to help pay for the transmission lines” notes Farrell, “but for meeting most state renewable energy goals, local resources provide comparable cost and greater economic benefits than long-distance imports.”
The report shows that states can meet their renewable energy needs with domestic onshore and offshore wind, rooftop solar PV, geothermal, combined-heat-and-power, and micro hydro.
"Federal policy should encourage all states, communities, individual households and businesses to maximize their internal use of this ubiquitous resource," the group says on its website. "Such a policy would reinforce the clear desire for states and cities to combine a low carbon energy strategy with an aggressive energy-based economic development strategy."
Current federal energy policy largely focuses on harnessing the renewable energy in a handful of states, constructing a $100-200 billion extra high voltage national transmission network and transporting that energy a thousand or more miles to customers in other regions.
The rationale for this focus on new extra high voltage transmission lines is that while renewable energy is widely distributed, the availability of these resources and the cost of harnessing them vary widely.
"However, when transmission costs are taken into account, the net cost variations among states are quite modest," Farrell writes on the group’s website. "And when we factor in the overall social, environmental and economic benefits to the 50 states from homegrown energy generation, self-reliance is almost always cheaper than import-dependence."
The energy self-reliant states from the report are: Alaska, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming.
The report is available as a pdf at the link below.
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