Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Palo Alto advisers accept study recommending barrier reduction for local solar, storage; staff to update price inputs annually
Summary
A consultant study presented to the Utilities Advisory Commission found most residential distributed energy technologies do not yet show net community cost benefits; commissioners voted to accept staff recommendations focusing on outreach and barrier removal and amended the motion to require annual updates to electricity price inputs in the cost‑benefit model.
Assistant Director for Climate Action Jonathan Ovenshyne presented a consultant study to the Palo Alto Utilities Advisory Commission on Dec. 3 assessing whether local flexible energy technologies — including solar plus batteries, vehicle‑to‑grid and demand response — can lower costs or defer grid upgrades and improve reliability.
The report concluded that, at the community level, residential installations of solar and storage generally do not deliver benefits that outweigh their costs, though large‑scale commercial solar plus storage came close to breakeven in the consultants’ modeling and commercial battery systems were near breakeven in some scenarios. “None of these technologies had benefits outweighing the cost,” Jonathan Ovenshyne said, noting the analysis excluded a separate time‑of‑use rate study that the utility is pursuing.
Staff recommended the city accept the consultant report, proceed with policies to reduce barriers to…
Already have an account? Log in
Subscribe to keep reading
Unlock the rest of this article — and every article on Citizen Portal.
- Unlimited articles
- AI-powered breakdowns of topics, speakers, decisions, and budgets
- Instant alerts when your location has a new meeting
- Follow topics and more locations
- 1,000 AI Insights / month, plus AI Chat
