Can renewables cost less than fossil fuel generation? And are they as reliable? It appears so, especially when they are coupled with a suite of distributed energy resources (DERs), such as virtual power plants and demand response. New reports by Energy Innovation Policy and Technology and the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) lay out the argument. In the The Coal-Cost Crossover, Energy Innovation partnered with Vibrant Clean Energy to create data about coal, wind and solar costs. The report compares coal plants’ marginal cost of energy to the lowest levelized cost of energy for wind or solar resources located near the plant. “We simply took all the annual generation in MWh from the coal plant and examined how much it would cost to build local wind or solar resources to replace that energy,” said Mike O’Boyle, Energy Innovation’s director of electricity policy.

Utilities adopting DERs

Mark Dyson, principal, Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and co-author of The Economics of Clean Energy Portfolios , said that in order to assess the reliability of renewable energy and DERs it’s important to ask the question, “Can DERs and renewables support the operation of a reliable system just as well as fossil plants?” Reliability, he argued, is a system attribute, not a unit attribute. As for his question, he said the answer is yes. “Our models show the math, but you can look to utilities and grid planners themselves for evidence.” For example, […]