Local Government Renewables Action Tracker

This Tracker has several important limitations:

• In order to highlight local governments’ considerable efforts and maintain a reasonable scope, the dataset intentionally excludes transactions that do not meet the inclusion criteria outlined in the methodology section of the tool's technical note.

• The renewable energy transactions included in the dataset should not be used to calculate any organization’s GHG emissions or estimate its progress toward a goal, as local governments can only claim to be using renewable electricity if they retain and retire the RECs associated with an energy project or, separately, purchase replacement RECs for the same quantity of energy. The Tracker does not have any inclusion criteria regarding REC treatment, as a local government’s treatment of the RECs is rarely announced and may change over time.

• While the Renewables Accelerator team intends to include as many eligible transactions and engagements as possible, the methodology used is insufficient to ensure that this dataset is fully comprehensive. The required desktop research relies on press releases, statements from parties within a transaction, or local media coverage. If a local government chooses not to publicize a renewable transaction, it is unlikely to be included in the Tracker.

• Although the transactions portion of the dataset is meant to be as comprehensive as possible, the same cannot be said about the engagements portion, which instead displays a limited set of examples illustrative of the range of engagement actions that local governments can pursue. Furthermore, local government engagements with utilities, regulators, legislators, and RTO/ISOs may be politically sensitive and/or not publicized. The engagements highlighted in the Tracker represent a subset of these actions that have been approved for publication by the relevant local governments.

• The dataset will continue to grow over time, so users may need to revisit the site periodically to ensure they are using the most accurate available data. The future of the website and maintenance are dependent upon having the funding and capacity to maintain ongoing data collection. If the Renewables Accelerator project concludes that this is necessary, the website will be taken down or a message will be added to alert website users to the time frame of the data shown.