Health co-benefits of sub-national renewable energy policy in the US;

摘要

State and local policy-makers in the US have shown interest in transitioning electricity systems towardrenewable 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 toassess the projected sub-national impacts of Renewable Portfolio Standards(RPSs) on air quality andhuman 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 estimatingeconomy-wide changes in emissions and their impacts, using a general equilibrium modelingapproach. This study is also the first to our knowledge to directly compare the health co-benefits ofRPSs to those of carbon pricing. We estimate that existing RPSs in the ‘Rust Belt’region generate ahealth co-benefit of $94 per ton CO[subscript 2] reduced ($2-477/tCO[subscript 2])in 2030, or 8¢ for each kWh of renewableenergy deployed (0.2–40¢ kWh[superscript -1])in 2015 dollars. Our central estimate is 34% larger than total policycosts. We estimate that the central marginal benefit of raising renewable energy requirements exceedsthe marginal cost, suggesting that strengthening RPSs increases net societal benefits. We also calculatethat 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.;