A Frontier Group guide to local energy – Frontier Group

Posted on September 9, 2026 by Now.Solar

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Distributed energy provides public health and environmental benefits and can make our energy system and communities more resilient.
Solar power

Most of our energy comes to us via pipeline, tanker or transmission line from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Big, centralized energy systems can sometimes harness economies of scale and improve efficiency. But often they leave us vulnerable to circumstances beyond our control – from extreme weather to mechanical failures to international conflict – and use a lot of land and resources.
When the owners of those systems use their political clout to keep us dependent on them – as they must to recoup their massive capital investments – they not only constrain our freedom, but they also limit our ability to use smarter, more sustainable energy solutions available to us right in the places where we live. 
Frontier Group staff have written about the potential of distributed energy, from its public health and environmental benefits to the ways it can make our energy system and our communities more resilient.
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In “The ‘soft energy path’ at 50: America’s road half-taken,” Tony Dutzik recounts the incredible progress America has made to use less energy and produce more of it from renewable sources produced locally. Energy visionary Amory Lovins called for a transition to these “soft” energy resources in an acclaimed 1976 essay, but as Dutzik writes, that transition is only half complete. And America once again faces an energy crossroads. 
Clean energy

Rooftop solar power has numerous benefits for the climate, for ecosystem and land conservation, and for improving the resilience of the electricity grid in the face of climate-related disruptions, all of which we reviewed in “The Environmental Case for Rooftop Solar Energy.”
Solar power
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Distributed solar maximizes use of the built environment: By putting solar panels on the roofs of homes, schools, businesses, warehouses and big box stores, the nation can increase the production of clean electricity while minimizing disruption of farmland, pasture or desert habitat. In “Solar on Superstores,” we calculated that by adding solar panels to the roofs of existing big box retail stores, supercenters, large grocery stores and malls, the nation could generate enough electricity to power almost 8 million average U.S. homes. 
Solar power
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Adding batteries to rooftop solar energy systems enables individual families or even neighborhoods to keep the lights on if extreme weather events damage transmission lines or limit generation at large power plants. In addition to home energy storage systems, batteries from parked electric school buses can store electricity and feed it back into the local power network, as we described in “Electric School Buses and the Grid.” . 
Electric vehicles
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Distributed energy sources don’t just change how we get electricity; they also create new opportunities to make our lives better. Nilou Yaar identified many ways that small solar applications were showing up in her daily life and noted that “every light that charges itself during the day and runs on its own battery at night is one less thing that needs to be hooked up to centralized power. They keep working in outages. And they subtly shift the idea that electricity must always arrive from somewhere else.”
Clean energy

Unfortunately, in many communities, adding solar panels and batteries to homes and businesses is easier said than done due to complex permitting and inspection processes. Many of these rules do nothing to protect health or safety, even as they add costs and delay. We documented examples of this problem in Texas and Illinois in 2025. 
Solar power
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Solar power
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Clean energy

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