Cities across America have entered a power struggle for renewable energy goals, with their fight pitched against utilities companies.
As American author John Addison writes in an article for Meeting of the Minds, the cities are now winning. Since 2005, Seattle’s largest utility, Seattle City Light, has been 100 per cent carbon neutral every year, while 92 per cent of the city’s electricity is from renewables, according to the author of books and publications about energy provision.
On the opposite side of the country in Georgia, Atlanta is committed to run on 100 per cent renewable energy by 2035. To achieve its goal, it is confronting fossil-fuel and nuclear dominant Georgia Power. And the city is not alone: customers also rebelled, due to high electric bills for nuclear and coal power, with regulatory barriers to solar power subsequently dropped. Georgia’s solar power capacity jumped 13-fold in five years.
In 2014, Minneapolis threatened to form a municipal utility, with the city’s utilities companies Xcel Energy and CenterPoint Energy then agreeing to renewable goals. Now, the city has a goal of using 100 per cent renewables for municipal facilities by 2022 and citywide by 2030.
