Health co-benefits of sub-national renewable energy policy in the US
Name
Dimanchev_2019_Environ._Res._Lett._14_085012.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.5 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
78da5afc1103b226e8d4fd9b2ee37847
Author(s)
Dimanchev, Emil G
Paltsev, Sergey
Yuan, Mei
Rothenberg, Daniel Alexander
Tessum, Christopher W
Marshall, Julian D
Selin, Noelle E
Date Issued
August 2019
Journal
Environmental Research Letters
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Dimanchev, Emil G. et al. "Health co-benefits of sub-national renewable energy policy in the US." Environmental Research Letters 14, 8 (August 2019): 085012 © 2019 The Author(s).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
State and local policy-makers in the US have shown interest in transitioning electricity systems toward
renewable energy sources and in mitigating harmful air pollution. However, the extent to which subnational renewable energy policies can improve air quality remains unclear. To investigate this issue,
we develop a systemic modeling framework that combines economic and air pollution models to
assess the projected sub-national impacts of Renewable Portfolio Standards(RPSs) on air quality and
human health, as well as on the economy and on climate change. We contribute to existing RPS costbenefit literature by providing a comprehensive assessment of economic costs and estimating
economy-wide changes in emissions and their impacts, using a general equilibrium modeling
approach. This study is also the first to our knowledge to directly compare the health co-benefits of
RPSs to those of carbon pricing. We estimate that existing RPSs in the ‘Rust Belt’region generate a
health co-benefit of $94 per ton CO[subscript 2] reduced ($2-477/tCO[subscript 2])in 2030, or 8¢ for each kWh of renewable
energy deployed (0.2–40¢ kWh[superscript -1])in 2015 dollars. Our central estimate is 34% larger than total policy
costs. We estimate that the central marginal benefit of raising renewable energy requirements exceeds
the marginal cost, suggesting that strengthening RPSs increases net societal benefits. We also calculate
that carbon pricing delivers health co-benefits of $211/tCO[subscript 2] in 2030, 63% greater than the health cobenefit of reducing the same amount of CO[subscript 2] through an RPS approach.
Subjects
Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
General Environmental Science
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab31d9
