Top 5 Actions in PennFuture's Energy Playbook: Building Our Energy Future

Audience: Intermediate

Pennsylvania’s electrical grid infrastructure and industrial facilities are aging. Electricity prices increased 41% between 2021 and 2025, and greenhouse gas emissions are rising. The Commonwealth is at the crux of overlapping crises intensified by decades of underinvestment in modernization and overinvestment in fossil fuels. While other neighboring states embrace more sustainable, 21st-century solutions, Pennsylvania remains laser-focused on attracting new energy-intensive industries to create a new market for fracked gas, calling it “innovation.”

While Harrisburg is plagued by economic and environmental policy inertia, PennFuture is releasing The PennFuture Energy Playbook: Building Our Energy Future to demonstrate that progress is possible. This Playbook offers clear, actionable policy recommendations to get Pennsylvania on the path to a more competitive and sustainable energy economy. It’s possible if we reinvest in the electricity infrastructure and signature industries that are already here by enabling and promoting clean energy solutions that are transforming neighboring states. Technological solutions exist. Pennsylvania state policymakers must summon the political will to craft and pass effective policy solutions and make the financial investments needed to leverage low-cost, clean technology to address the overlapping energy and affordability crises. Throughout this playbook, PennFuture demonstrates how smart policy, planning, and well-designed financial tools can make this vision a reality in which all Pennsylvanians can live healthy, sustainable lives.

The first steps on the path from decline towards prosperity are clear: implement policies that advance clean energy technologies, energy efficiency, and the modernization of the existing grid and power generating facilities; and establish financial tools to support these policies. Our neighboring states show how policy models can be successfully done: New York’s Clean Energy Standards positions the state to reach 70% renewable energy by 2030, and New Jersey’s Garden State Energy Storage Incentive Program provides funding for grid scale battery storage.

Top 5 Actions for PA Decisionmakers

CREATING A MODERNIZED GRID

The foundation of a sustainable economy, one that balances the present needs of society with those of future generations, is a modernized and diverse energy grid—a bulk power system that is reliable, affordable, clean, and long-lasting.

• Update the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard by passing legislation requiring 35% of electricity to be generated by renewable energy sources.
• Create a strategic plan for deploying renewably powered microgrids across PA. It should identify priority areas and clear objectives to increase grid reliability.
• Set an energy storage target for the state.

DISTRIBUTED GENERATION AND SOLAR ENERGY

Solar power, as a distributed resource, offers a unique opportunity to promote energy independence and improve the economic strength of Pennsylvania communities.

• Pass Community Solar enabling legislation.
• Incentivize solar development on previously impacted, commercial, or industrial properties, prioritizing the rooftops of warehouses, fulfillment centers, and large government buildings.
• Expand tax incentives for solar development.

SOLAR DEVELOPMENT IN THE COALFIELDS

The coal industry will continue to decline as renewable energy rises, and Pennsylvania can begin planning a cleaner, greener future today—one that revitalizes and strengthens the self-reliance and resilience of coal communities. By developing solar on the abandoned mine lands (AMLs) of today, Pennsylvania can ensure a brighter future for more communities in coal country tomorrow.

• Develop a roadmap and tools for developing solar on future shuttered mines.
• Pass Community Solar enabling legislation.

REDEVELOPING COAL-FIRED POWER PLANTS

Shuttered coal-fired power plants offer a unique, multifaceted opportunity: large industrial footprints with grid interconnection rights, heavy infrastructure, and the capacity to anchor more complex and resilient redevelopment, such as eco-industrial parks. By building eco-industrial parks on sites of former coal-fired power plants, these former energy communities can participate in the clean energy transition and diversify their local economies.

• Develop a comprehensive new vision for redeveloping coal-fired power plants that does not default to converting old facilities to gas-fired power plants and provides the financial tools needed to encourage comprehensive redevelopment.

DECARBONIZING INDUSTRY

It is possible to remove the economic barrier to entry for companies investing in electrification and energy efficiency by increasing the affordability and attractiveness of existing technology. Policies that adapt and increase investments in existing financial programs, leverage public procurement, maintain and expand technical assistance, and stabilize regulations would support long-term decarbonization efforts.

• Promote sustainable development by leveraging environmental standards attached to financial resources.
• Provide funding specifically for repurposing shuttered coal-fired power plants
• Strengthen green procurement schemes for public infrastructure projects that aim to purchase materials with reduced greenhouse gas emissions over their lifecycle.

While the cost of clean energy and battery storage continues to drop and the financial and environmental costs of extracting and burning fossil fuels continue to rise, it does not make sense to perpetuate a fossil fuel-based economic and energy strategy that neither Pennsylvanians nor the planet can afford.

Ultimately, Pennsylvania doesn't have an energy problem—we have a political will problem. Clean energy solutions to lower costs and strengthen our grid already exist. While neighboring states are building the energy economy of the future, we're still chasing another boom-and-bust cycle. This playbook is our opportunity to catch up, compete, and lead in the 21st century.