PAS Memo is an online newsletter published six times a year that reaches thousands of practitioners through APA's Planning Advisory Service.
Today's planners need to stay informed about innovative strategies and techniques for a wide range of planning topics.
PAS Memo delivers this information to you. It highlights current cutting-edge topics — such as green roofs and climate change adaptation — while providing the latest findings and best practices in classic planning areas such as stormwater management and housing affordability.
PAS Memo is written by practicing planners and experts in the field eager to share their expertise through illuminating case studies. Each article provides a list of links to online resources for planners who want to dig deeper.
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Distributed Renewable Energy: Anticipating Energy Development in Communities
By Josh Hohn, AICP
In the last few years, two significant trends have emerged in how we generate our electricity in the United States: a steady increase in the generation of power from renewable sources, and the integration of smaller, more dispersed facilities into a power-generation landscape that has up until now mostly consisted of massive, centrally located plants. This movement toward decentralized facilities, or "distributed generation," has thus far been gradual. However, the pace of change could speed up substantially because of a shift in how electricity generated from distributed sources — and how much of it — is allowed to be loaded onto the electrical grid.
This PAS Memo defines distributed generation, discussing some of the primary benefits and obstacles to the distributed generation of renewable energy. It describes how regulatory and policy changes, including CLEAN programs, could set the stage for a substantial increase in distributed generation and presents considerations planners should make in anticipation of such a shift. Rather than occurring in the hinterlands, generation of energy, in one form or another, will increasingly be a part of the local landscape.
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