Synopsis

The Local Government Renewables Action Tracker is an interactive web tool that presents a compilation of the renewable electricity transactions and advocacy efforts that have been completed by U.S. cities, counties, municipal utilities, and community choice aggregations.

Executive Summary

The Local Government Renewable Actions Tracker (hereafter referred to as the “Tracker”) is a resource developed by the American Cities Climate Challenge Renewables Accelerator, a partnership between World Resources Institute (WRI) and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) to help local governments procure renewable electricity. It was created as part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ American Cities Climate Challenge (ACCC), a two-year program that provides more than 100 U.S. local governments with powerful new resources and access to cutting-edge support to help them meet—or beat—their near-term carbon reduction goals.

The Tracker is an interactive web tool hosted on the ACCC Renewables Accelerator website (www.cityrenewables.org) that presents a compilation of the renewable electricity transactions and advocacy efforts that have been completed by U.S. cities, counties, municipal utilities, and community choice aggregations. The Tracker, created with both publicly available and crowdsourced data, allows local government staff, policymakers, and renewable energy professionals to identify the actions taken by communities across the United States to support renewable energy development. In addition, the Tracker displays the aggregated total capacity, in megawatts, of renewable electricity generation that has been supported or directly enabled through local governments’ efforts.

This technical note outlines the scope of the Tracker, the approach used to identify eligible actions, the methodology behind its presentation, and the system in place for monitoring and updating the resource.