CARBON REDUCTION COSTS IN NEW ENGLAND'S POWER SECTOR

Major US electric utility climate pledges have the potential to collectively reduce power sector emissions by one-third

Driving forces of provincial-level CO2 emissions in China’s power sector based on LMDI method

Fuzzy optimization for peer-to-peer (P2P)multi-period renewable energy trading planning

Drivers of renewable energy penetration and its role in power sector's deep decarbonization towards carbon peak

Growing international concern over the threat of global climate change has led to proposals to buy insurance against this threat by reducing emissions of carbon (short for carbon dioxide) and other greenhouse gases below current levels. Concern over these and other, non-climatic environmental effects of electricity generation has led a number of states to adopt or explore new mechanisms for incorporating environmental externalities in utility resource planning. For example, the New York and Massachusetts utility commissions have adopted monetized surcharges (or adders) to induce emission reductions of federally regulated air pollutants (notably, SO{sub 2}, NO{sub x}, and particulates) beyond federally mandated levels. These regulations also include preliminary estimates of the cost of reducing carbon emissions, for which no federal regulations exist at this time. Within New England, regulators and utilities have also held several workshops and meetings to discuss alternative methods of incorporating externalities as well as the feasibility of regional approaches. This study examines the potential for reduced carbon emissions in the New England power sector as well as the cost and rate impacts of two policy approaches: environmental externality surcharges and a target- based approach. We analyze the following questions: Does New England have sufficient low-carbon resources tomore » achieve significant reductions (10% to 20% below current levels) in fossil carbon emissions in its utility sector? What reductions could be achieved at a maximum? What is the expected cost of carbon reductions as a function of the reduction goal? How would carbon reduction strategies affect electricity rates? How effective are environmental externality cost surcharges as an instrument in bringing about carbon reductions? To what extent could the minimization of total electricity costs alone result in carbon reductions relative to conventional resource plans?« less

Positive synergy or negative synergy: An assessment of the carbon emission reduction effect of renewable energy policy mixes on China's power sector

Carbon emission scenarios of China's power sector: Impact of controlling measures and carbon pricing mechanism

Internet Data Center (IDC) is one of important emerging cyber-physical systems. To guarantee the quality of service for their worldwide users, large Internet service providers usually operate multiple geographically distributed IDCs. The enormous power consumption of these data centers may lead to both huge electricity bills and considerable carbon emissions. To mitigate these problems, on-site renewable energy plants are emerging in recent years. Since the renewable energy is intermittent, greening geographical load balancing (GGLB for short) has been proposed to reduce both the electricity bills and carbon emissions by following the renewables. However, GGLB is not able to well deal with the wildly fluctuating wind power when applied into IDCs with on-site wind energy plants. It may either fail to minimize the total electricity bills or incur the costly frequent on---off switching of servers. In order to minimize the total electricity bills of geographically distributed IDCs with on-site wind energy plants, we formulate the total electricity bills minimization problem and propose a novel two-time-scale load balancing framework TLB to solve it. First, TLB models the runtime cooling efficiency for each IDC. Then it predicts the future fine-grained (e.g., 10-min) on-site wind power output at the beginning of each scheduling period (e.g., an hour). After that, TLB transforms the primal optimization problem into a typical mixed-integer linear programming problem and solves it to finally obtain the optimal scheduling policy including the open server number as well as the request routing policy. It is worth noting that the open server number of each IDC will remain the same during each scheduling period. As an application instance of TLB, we also design a two-time-scale load balancing algorithm TLB-ARMA for our experimental scenario. Evaluation results based on real-life traces show that TLB-ARMA is able to reduce the total electricity bills by as much as 12.58 % compared with the hourly executed GGLB without incurring the costly repeated on---off switching of servers.

The biggest increase in carbon emissions took place in the power sector, accounting for more than 40% of global carbon emissions. Identifying critical sectors of carbon emissions in the upstream power sector and mapping out emission reduction pathways are core components of achieving supply chain-wide carbon reductions in China. However, the path to achieving supply chain-wide carbon reductions in China from the provincial perspective is still unclear. This study quantifies the embodied carbon emissions of different power generation technologies by region using a multi-regional input-output-based hybrid approach. The critical upstream sectors that indirectly drive or transport large amounts of carbon emissions through supply chains are identified using both consumption-based and betweenness-based methods. The changes in supply chain-wide carbon emissions of the power sector by region under different emission reduction policy scenarios are also examined. The results indicate that the solar power sector brings the highest carbon reduction benefits, with an average carbon intensity of 1.25 t/10000 yuan. Significant differences in embodied carbon intensity across provinces for the same type of power generation sector are observed, and there is a mismatch between current installation and carbon reduction targets in the coal-fired and wind power sectors. Critical sectors of carbon emissions in the upstream power sector are concentrated in the energy sector and energy-intensive sectors, while the electrical machinery and equipment sector is also key to alleviating environmental pressures as an important upstream carbon transmission sector. Besides, the implementation of the "Replacing Small Generation Units with Large Ones" policy at the provincial level, especially in northwest China, and “further enhancing the supply capacity of clean energy” can effectively promote the emission reduction of the whole supply chain in the power sector. The results presented in this paper may provide a reference for the provincial government to rationally plan future low-carbon transformation paths of the power sector.

Reasonable allocation of carbon emission rights aids in the realization of the goal of carbon emission reduction. The purpose of this paper is to examine how carbon emission rights in the power sector in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (the YREB) are distributed. The YREB spans China’s eastern, central, and western areas. The levels of development and resource endowment differ significantly across regions, resulting in great heterogeneity in the YREB provinces’ carbon emission rights distribution in the power sector. The ZSG–DEA model is used in this paper to re-adjust the power sector’s carbon emission quotas in each province to achieve optimal efficiency under the country’s overall carbon emission reduction target. The results show that: (1) In most provinces, the power sector’s initial distribution efficiency is inefficient. Only Zhejiang and Yunnan have reached the production frontier, with Jiangxi and Chongqing having the lowest distribution efficiency. In the future, we should concentrate our efforts on them for conserving energy and lowering emissions; (2) The initial distribution efficiency of the power sector in the YREB’s upstream, midstream, and downstream regions is considerably different. Most upstream and downstream provinces have higher carbon emission quotas, while most midstream provinces have less, implying that the power sector in the midstream provinces faces greater emission reduction challenges; (3) The carbon emission quotas of the power industry varies greatly between provinces and shows different spatial features over time. In the early stage (2021–2027), the carbon emission quota varies substantially, while for the later stage (2027–2030), it is rather balanced. Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Sichuan, and Yunnan are more likely to turn into sellers in the market for carbon emission trading with larger carbon emission quotas. While Jiangxi and Chongqing are more likely to turn into buyers in the market for carbon emission trading with fewer carbon emission quotas. Other provinces’ carbon emission quotas are more evenly distributed. To successfully achieve China’s emission reduction target by 2030, the YREB should promote regional collaboration, optimize industrial structure, accelerate technical innovation, establish emission reduction regulations, and provide financial support based on local conditions.

Sharply reducing carbon emissions is imperative to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Yet even in the power sector—often viewed as the lynchpin to economy-wide decarbonization, and where low-carbon solutions are increasingly plentiful and cost-effective—the pace and scale of the required transformation can be daunting. A review of historical trends, however, shows the progress the power sector has already made in reducing emissions. Fifteen years ago, many business-as-usual projections anticipated that annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power supply in the United States would reach 3,000 million metric tons (MMT) in 2020. In fact, direct power-sector CO2 emissions in 2020 were 1,450 MMT—roughly 50% below the earlier projections. By this metric, in only 15 years the country’s power sector has gone halfway to zero emissions. Other metrics also evolved differently than projected: total consumer electricity costs (i.e., bills) were 18% lower; costs to human health and the climate were 92% and 52% lower, respectively; and the number of jobs in electricity generation was 29% higher. Economic, technical, and policy factors contributed to this success, including sectoral changes, energy efficiency, wind and solar, continued operations of the nuclear fleet, and coal-to-gas fuel switching. This historical record demonstrates the ability of technological and policy changes to set the power sector on a dramatically different emissions trajectory. Past success, however, does not trivialize the challenges that remain for further decarbonization in the power sector and beyond. Nor does it offer a specific roadmap for how best to achieve additional power-sector emissions reductions. Numerous challenges confront a zero-emissions pathway, and future strategies will likely differ from those of the past. Many recent studies have assessed how to make further progress in decarbonizing the power sector on the pathway to decarbonizing the economy as a whole. We summarize the core results of those studies, but the primary goal of this report is to highlight the progress that has already been made in reducing power-sector emissions. As the country maps out a plan for further decarbonization, experience from the past 15 years offers two central lessons. First, policy and technology advancement are imperative to achieving significant emissions reductions. Second, our ability to predict the future is limited, and so it will be crucial to adapt as we gain policy experience and as technologies advance in unexpected ways.

Faced with increasingly strict carbon emission control, high-emission enterprises need scientific and rational management systems and methods to strengthen carbon emission reduction management. Among the many management systems and methods, the carbon budget has become an effective emission reduction management tool, allowing the planning of carbon emissions and emission reduction activities and rational arrangement of economic inputs. However, judging from the research status and business practices in China and abroad, there is no general carbon budget system to guide the development of carbon emission and emission reduction activities. Based on this background, this paper first attempts to construct an enterprise carbon budget system comprising four sub-budgets: carbon emission, carbon emission reduction and cost, carbon emission rights trading, and carbon emission reduction net profit/loss. It draws on the idea of interactive control to consider the impact of changes in carbon prices, energy prices, and policy guidelines on carbon emission reductions and losses. A carbon budget management system based on interactive control is then constructed and applied to China National Aviation Holding Air China Group (AC Aviation). The research results show that the carbon budget system based on interactive control can dynamically adjust carbon emission reduction behavior based on changes in carbon and energy prices to make carbon budgeting a more viable carbon reduction tool and institutional arrangement.

Effectively addressing today’s energy challenges requires advanced technologies along with policies that influence economic markets while advancing the public good.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is regarded as the most prominent piece of federal climate legislation in the U.S. thus far. This paper investigates potential impacts of IRA on the power sector, which is the focus of many core IRA provisions. We summarize a multi-model comparison of IRA to identify robust findings and variation in power sector investments, emissions, and costs across 11 models of the U.S. energy system and electricity sector. Our results project that IRA incentives accelerate the deployment of low-emitting capacity, increasing average annual additions by up to 3.2 times current levels through 2035. CO2 emissions reductions from electricity generation across models range from 47%–83% below 2005 in 2030 (68% average) and 66%–87% in 2035 (78% average). Our higher clean electricity deployment and lower emissions under IRA, compared with earlier U.S. modeling, change the baseline for future policymaking and analysis. IRA helps to bring projected U.S. power sector and economy-wide emissions closer to near-term climate targets; however, no models indicate that these targets will be met with IRA alone, which suggests that additional policies, incentives, and private sector actions are needed.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10098-022-02456-1.