Engaging Communities in Energy Transition

With the adoption of distributed energy resources (DER) growing, stakeholders and regulators are increasingly focused on ensuring utilities' energy transition is an equitable process that benefits impacted communities.

In an article for Grid Forward, Guidehouse's Stuart Schare, Katie Bertcher, and Debyani Ghosh, along with Puget Sound Energy (PSE's) Kimo Spector, discuss how utilities can engage communities to help drive equity while meeting decarbonization and resiliency objectives. Our experts suggest that resource procurement is a critical way of integrating communities as active contributors to DER investments that can lead to improved effectiveness and efficiency for the utility and better outcomes for society.

"In order to achieve meaningful collaborative and equitable outcomes, utility resource procurement processes need to actively and deliberatively support community partners," emphasized the article.

The article also highlights outcomes from community engagement by explaining how PSE worked with Guidehouse to tackle equitable resource procurement. To ensure smaller vendors had the opportunity to compete with large established businesses, PSE engaged local vendors and community organization by separating its DER procurement RFP into different tracks for large and small players. To further ensure engagement, PSE proactively invited smaller local and community-focused entities to participate in the RFP.

"In its initial iteration, PSE’s novel approach to resource procurement proved successful in increasing local community engagement to genuinely become part of the solution, and provides a strong example from which to develop further community centered procurement methods," the authors explained.

This article was co-authored by Guidehouse’s Katie Bertcher, and Debyani Ghosh, and PSE's Kimo Spector.