Sustainable Distributed Energy Resources: Law and Policy

Over the last decades, the ongoing global energy transition and the quest for innovative ways to promote energy efficiency; and to reduce the environmental footprints, infrastructure gaps, and costs of electricity from centralized energy systems, have resulted in an exponential rise in initiatives aimed at advancing Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). The rising focus on DERs across the world means that the sustainability of future electricity systems will be evaluated and governed by four key vectors of transformation (the four ‘Ds’): (a) decarbonization; (b) decentralization; (c) digitalization; and (d) democratization. However, despite the promise and potential of DERs, a wide range of environmental, social, and economic challenges arise in their implementation, which if not holistically addressed could limit the full potential of DERs to advance a secure and sustainable energy future. Those concerns have to do with sustainability and are addressed by this book. Overall, the book aims to examine the latest development of law and policy on sustainable DERs in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia, and North and South America; evaluate how legal and regulatory systems can better enhance sustainable DERs by addressing the wide range of environment and land tenure concerns, technology gaps, network regulation, gender justice, human rights, financing, data and consumer protection, and other broad sustainability challenges in current implementation and deployment; and provide practical recommendations on how legal, governance, and contractual frameworks, including energy entrepreneurship education, can better enhance decentralized energy communities, energy entrepreneurship, and co-operative business models, to promote a secure and sustainable energy future through DERs.