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PNNL researchers release study on projected costs to meet future electricity capacity

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have released a new study that projects the costs required to build the necessary capacity of electricity infrastructure to meet the rising demands over the course of the century.

The cost estimate is, in part, based on trends and studies that project a warner future. Since 1998, eight of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have occurred. As temperatures rise, demand for electricity to cool buildings will increase. This, in turn, will lead to the need for an expanded power sector.

The PNNL study looks at how increased peak electricity demand resulting from rising temperature will determine how much new capacity, from power plants to wind turbines, may be needed. The authors consider several factors, including electricity trade between regions, labor productivity, changes in building floor space and shell designs, fuel prices and availability, shifting population sizes, and changes in technology and water availability, among other dynamic forces that shape demand.

“We have access to detailed models that capture electricity use down to the hour,” lead author Zarrar Khan said. “But they don’t capture all the other dynamics that we include in this model. We combine input from multiple sectors to get a full picture, and I think this is one of the first studies to do that while capturing sub-annual temperature impacts on building heating and cooling demands.”

Khan is a computational scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a partnership between Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland where researchers explore the interactions between human, energy, and environmental systems.

The authors modeled two scenarios to project how capacity would need to grow to meet future U.S. energy demand. The first is based on a future where temperatures change in response to a changing climate, with peak electricity demand rising in turn. The second imagines a future where temperatures and their associated peak demands remain constant from 2015 onward. Both scenarios were projected through the year 2100. Overall, they found that cooling demand was projected to rise while heating demand declined.

Specifically, in a scenario where U.S. temperatures do not change from 2015 levels, the authors determined that California’s power capacity would need to rise to 102 gigawatts by 2100 to meet demand. That upgrade would require an estimated $322 billion investment spent from 2015 to the end of the century. In the other scenario, where temperatures rise, California’s needed capacity would climb to 120 gigawatts, requiring a $393 billion investment spent by 2100.

When you pull back the lens to look nationally, the energy capacity required to meet demand reaches 2,017 gigawatts with temperature changes factored in. This would require a $7.3 trillion investment spent by 2100. In that scenario, the costs directly to temperature changes would total $1 trillion. To provide some perspective, the nation’s electricity generating capacity was roughly 1,200 gigawatts as of March 2020.

PNNLʻs research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science.

Dave Kovaleski

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