The present study finds that by including the co-optimization of the distribution system, the contiguous United States could spend $473 billion less on cleaning the electricity system by 95% by 2050 and add over 8 million new jobs. The clean electricity system is even cheaper than BAU, without distribution co-optimization to the tune of $88 billion. The findings suggest that local solar and storage can amplified utility-scale wind and solar as well as provide economic stimulus to all regions across the contiguous US.

The study finds that wind, solar, storage and transmission can be complements to each other to help reduce the cost to decarbonize the electricity system. Transmission provides spatial diversity, storage provides temporal diversity, and the wind and solar provide the low-cost, emission-free generation. Further, the distributed solar and storage provide local back-up and diversity for consumers to be able to purchase their electricity product without significant alterations to their behavior: in other words, the distributed solar and storage alters demand to supply, without the customers noticing.

The study was produced by VCE, for the Coalition for Community Solar Access, Vote Solar, and Local Solar For All. Vibrant Clean Energy, LLC performed all the modeling using the WIS:dom®-P model with nationally recognized publicly available data and assumptions. The executive summary, slide deck white paper, summary spreadsheet, and a press release are provided (a full technical report will be released shortly). Technical documentation for the WIS:dom®-P model can be found here.