First things first. What’s an energyshed?
Perhaps it’s best to think of a watershed: the streams and rivers that provide water for a particular region. An energyshed is similar, just with charged electrons instead of water.
Metro Atlanta’s energyshed includes any power generation facility and related transmission lines and distribution infrastructure that provide energy to meet our region’s needs, from nuclear to coal and natural gas to renewables.
It’s a large geography. Metro Atlanta draws power from facilities as far away as Mississippi and northwest Florida.
About the Georgia Energyshed Project
ARC has teamed up with researchers from Georgia Tech and experts from the Southface Institute to take an in-depth look at metro Atlanta’s energyshed
The Georgia Energyshed project is funded through a U.S. Department of Energy grant that Georgia Tech received in late 2022. Georgia Tech brought on ARC and Southface as partners in the three-year project effort, which began about a year ago.
The goal is to develop a new approach to regional resource management and help inform policy decisions at the local level through the development of decision support tools and guidance.
Focusing on an energyshed can provide a way to better understand and evaluate electricity supply, use, greenhouse gas emissions generated from the energy sector, issues around energy equity, as well as reliability and resilience needs. Energysheds can also help show how the costs and benefits of an energy system are distributed within and between geographic communities.
What is ARC’s Role?
ARC was brought in by Georgia Tech to provide regional planning expertise, with a focus on community engagement. After all, ARC has decades of experience in regional planning initiatives from transportation to water resources.
As a first step, ARC created an 12-member Energy and Climate Council made up of ARC Board members and experts from the public, academic, non-profit, and private sectors to serve as an project advisory board for the project. ARC will also be responsible for broader public outreach and testing any dashboards and other tools that are created by the Georgia Tech and Southface teams.
Why This Matters:
The Georgia Energyshed project comes at a critical time. Renewable energy sources like solar are on the rise, and we’re at the early stages of a historic shift to electric vehicles.
At the same time, our region’s energy needs are on the rise. This is driven by our growing population (ARC forecasts we’ll add 1.9 million people by 2050) and an increasing demand from manufacturing facilities, data centers, and other industries.
The project will also provide critical knowledge about our region’s changing energy needs and opportunities that will inform related ARC projects and planning initiatives.
This includes development of an upcoming Regional Clean Electricity Plan to help local governments make their buildings and operations run on carbon-free electricity and be more energy efficient, as well as development of the Atlanta region’s first long-range Comprehensive Climate Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality.
What’s Next ATL, produced by the Atlanta Regional Commission, is a community resource that explores how metro Atlanta is growing and changing, and how the region is addressing its most pressing challenges.
