Next year brings renewed prospects for America to support renewable energy and, in turn, address climate change, while creating hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs, providing enormous social and health benefits, ensuring energy security and resilience, and spurring a post-COVID economic recovery. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) today released its Vision for Driving a Clean Energy Transformation Plan for the incoming administration, laying out the four pillars that the federal government can harness to achieve long-term clean energy and carbon goals.
“America begins this new decade with the chance to shape an affordable, thriving energy future defined by clean electricity. Our country’s leaders must now move forward with bold, sensible policies to create that future, or risk leaving hundreds of thousands of new jobs and hundreds of billions in investments behind. With this plan, the American renewable energy sector stands ready to help revitalize the U.S. economy and forge a more prosperous future for local communities across the country.” – AWEA CEO Tom Kiernan
How do we get there? While the enactment of meaningful clean energy targets and carbon policies are critically important for driving renewable energy deployment, other pillars of federal policy action are just as critical for enabling the build-out of renewable energy to meet the administration’s goal of decarbonizing the electric sector. Unleashing the economic powerhouse of renewable energy will require a holistic approach to ensuring transmission, permitting, market, and other policy reforms support and enable getting renewable power to consumers. This will require, in part, investments in our nation’s grid and improving permitting timelines for renewable energy sources and transmission to ensure America can meet clean energy goals on time. With a breakdown of executive, regulatory, and congressional priorities for 2021, AWEA’s full plan to achieve this collaborative promise of an American grid powered by wind, solar, hydropower.
