People across the country – from coast to coast, and from small towns to big cities – are urging their communities to switch to one hundred percent renewable energy.

Rohrbach: “Citizens are speaking up and asking for it, and there is widespread public demand.”

Kassie Rohrbach is deputy director of “Ready for 100,” a Sierra Club campaign helping mobilize people to demand community-wide clean energy.

More than a hundred U.S. cities have already committed to transition to 100% renewable electricity. And most of them aim to meet that goal by 2035.

Rohrbach says that these individual city commitments add up to regional pressure on utilities to obtain more electricity from renewables and less from fossil fuels.

Rohrbach: “That collective power, you know, that collective customer demand, is something the utility has to respond to.”

For example, Rohrbach says that in Colorado, local demand for clean energy helped motivate Xcel Energy, a large interstate utility, to commit to one hundred percent carbon-free electricity by 2050.

So she says the changes that citizens demand for their own homes and towns can help build a clean energy economy on a much larger scale.

Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy/ChavoBart Digital Media.