The AIA 2030 Commitment: Deregulate This!

When I was growing up near Syracuse, NY, the drinking age was 18. I went to college in Pennsylvania in the mid-70’s. At the time, the drinking age there was 21. Mea culpa, I would buy cheap beer (Utica Club) at home and smuggle it into my dorm by the case.

This changed when the US Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age act of 1984. Congress knew that legislating the drinking age was one of those powers reserved to the states. So instead of usurping their Federal authority, the aforementioned Drinking Age Act reduced the federal highway funding by 10% per year to every state that didn’t make 21 their drinking age. By 1995, the USA had a uniform national drinking age.

What does this have to do with the AIA 2030 Commitment? Glad you asked.

Those of us who have signed the Commitment have pledged that all the new buildings, architectural interiors, and major renovations we design will be carbon-neutral by the year 2030. This, of course, doesn’t mean our projects won’t need energy to operate. It means they will be radically energy efficient, and the energy they do need will be entirely provided by renewable sources.

And by the year 2030, we hope that a lot of grid-sourced power will come from distributed solar and wind generation. But before this can happen, our nation needs to take a good hard look at how we regulate distributed generation (or “DG”).

Caution: this is a complicated topic, and I’m substantially out of my depth with this blog post. But here’s what I’ve managed to find out: As of this writing, 33 US States have some form of distributed generation interconnection standards. But they’re wildly inconsistent. New York allows a maximum system size of 2 megawatts. Washington allows 20 megawatts. Massachusetts and California have no maximum system sizes. Twelve US states have interconnection guidelines, not standards. Five states have no rules at all.

Now I’m no expert, but this doesn’t look like the kind of regulatory environment that would support the nationwide proliferation of distributed renewable energy generation. It looks like a ball of confusion. The kind of legal crazy-quilt that you sometimes get when states and municipalities write their own rules (in this case heavily influenced by investor-owned utilities) about something that should be consistent from coast-to-coast. Like the drinking age.

To make it worse, national DG interconnection standards already exist. An American professional society, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the “world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology”) created them with the support of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and made them available to the US Department of Energy. Where I assume they sit in a file.

Like my example of the drinking age, the adoption of a national uniform DG interconnection standard may need some help to make it happen. Like Congressional leadership and a good carrot/stick approach. Maybe we hold federal energy production subsidies hostage until state utility commissions see the light?

Or heck, maybe we just need a slogan. This stuff doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.

So let’s try it this way: You say you want American energy independence? You say regulation is stifling growth? You say you want government to get out of the way and let innovation happen? In this case, I agree. Let’s DEREGULATE DG!

I will most certainly drink to that.

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