One of the preeminent challenges of our time is to stop and then reverse the impacts of climate change. While it is widely recognized that the key to stopping climate change is to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel emissions, the world is not on track to accomplish this task in a timely manner. While renewable energy (RE) is now generally less expensive than fossil fuel (FF) energy for electricity generation, the rapid rise in deployment of RE has not yet led to a global decrease of FF use. Furthermore, there are hundreds of millions of people around the world who live in “energy poverty” and it is imperative that they are brought out of this poverty using clean renewable energy rather than dirty fossil fuels.

While many organizations are working on developing and deploying renewable energy, the Resilient Futures Consortium is focusing on a small set of critical initiatives that will help unleash the potential of renewable energy and allow it to rapidly replace fossil fuel energy for existing energy demand in addition to its current role of supplying energy for new demand. These initiates will also help make clean, reliable, and affordable energy available to everyone, everywhere.

Key Areas Of Focus

Removing Grid Barriers to Renewable Energy Deployment:  While renewable energy is less expensive than fossil fuel energy for electricity generation in most parts of the world (and is the cheapest form of energy, by far, everywhere when climate damage and fossil fuel pollution are accounted for), there are currently a number of technical, legal, and regulatory barriers related to the electricity grid that slow the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy. These barriers are sometimes related to RE’s higher variability compared to fossil fuels and sometimes the barriers are related to the historical dominance and political power of the fossil fuel industry.

In this initiative, we will access experts around the world to set technical, legal, and regulatory frameworks that will accelerate connection of renewable energy resources to the electricity grid. Once these frameworks are established, we will work with governments, regulatory bodies, utilities, NGOs, and other institutions to see that these frameworks are implemented quickly to help the world move quickly away from fossil fuels and towards a clean energy future.

Intelligent Management of Renewable Distributed Energy Resources and the Grid: While there are many advantages to using renewable distributed energy resources (DERs) to supply electricity to people and businesses, including improved energy reliability and resilience, lower costs, and improved efficiency, it is often a challenge to integrate renewable DERs into a grid even though such integration can further enhance the benefits of renewable DERs. Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to manage electricity supply and demand in industrial settings, such as Google using AI to lower its data center energy costs by 40%, and the use of AI to control integration of renewable DERs on the grid could provide far more benefits to society.

In this initiative, we will bring together leaders in AI, renewable energy, grid operations, and other fields to establish technical, legal, and regulatory frameworks for more intelligent control of energy flows between renewable distributed energy resources, the grid, and end users. Once established, we will work with governments, regulatory bodies, utilities, NGOs and other institutions to have these frameworks implemented to improve the reliability and resilience of the grid, lower clean energy costs, and support 100% energy supply from renewable resources.

While the first initiative is focused on speeding connection of renewable resources to the grid and the second is focused on improving grid operations, there is significant synergy between the two.

Standards to Promote Clean, Reliable, and Affordable Energy for Everyone Everywhere: While the use of renewable energy is growing at the family, community, sub-national and national levels around the world, there are still hundreds of millions of people that live in energy poverty. This is despite the fact that the cost of solar PV and battery storage have dropped 80~90% in the past decade and costs are expected to continue this trend. To accelerate the deployment of renewable energy to underserved families and communities, technical, financial, and other barriers must be overcome.

In this initiative, we will explore the barriers that slow or prevent the adoption and deployment of renewable energy in both developing and developed economies and provide guidance to governments and other institutions on how to overcome these barriers and speed the deployment of sustainable, clean, reliable, and affordable energy to everyone everywhere.