Conclusion: Sustainable Distributed Energy Resources and the Future of Electricity Law

As investments in distributed energy resources (DERs) infrastructure grow in scale and speed across the world, legal challenges are also emerging, which if not addressed may limit the decarbonization, decentralization, digitalization, and democratization potentials of DERs. Achieving the 4Ds of DERs raise the need for sustainability-aligned electricity contracts, legislation, and investment agreements that accelerate a secure and sustainable energy future. Sustainability-aligned legal frameworks on DERs can support faster and more cost-effective DER development and integration into extant grids. However, as the chapters of this book demonstrate, in several jurisdictions such transformations are not easily forthcoming. Electricity laws and policies that were designed many years ago based on the centralized model, and before the rapid penetration of DERs, are increasingly incapable of keeping pace with the legal and sustainability dimensions of integrating DERs into the grid. What are the key legal challenges to integrating social, environmental, and economic sustainability in the design and implementation of DERs? What are the required legal and policy approaches to address such gaps? These are what we address in this chapter. This concluding chapter examines the drivers of the slow and fragmented response to the wide range of social, environmental, and economic challenges of DER deployment in frontier jurisdictions. It unpacks the guiding principles of sustainability-aligned DER governance required to advance a just, inclusive, and rights-based deployment of DERs. Sustainability-aligned DER legislation, legal drafting, contract negotiation, policymaking, and education approaches are urgently required to balance and integrate the 4Ds in extant and future DERs, ranging from project due diligence, licensing and approval, to operations, decommissioning, and end-of-lifetime closure.