Evaluating a Proposed 20 Percent National Renewable Portfolio Standard

摘要

This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the impacts of a proposed 20% national renewable portfolio standard (RPS) by 2021, which has been advanced in the U.S. Congress by Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. The paper was prepared before the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama on February 17, 2009, and thus does not consider important changes in renewable energy (RE) policy that need to be addressed in follow-on analysis. A renewable portfolio standard is a mandate requiring certain electricity retailers to provide a minimum specified share of their total electricity sales from qualifying renewable power generation. The draft legislation analyzed here exempts small electricity providersthose selling less than 4 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) per yearand allows up to 25% of the RPS total to be met through qualifying energy efficiency (EE) projects. Existing hydropower and municipal solid-waste generation resources do not qualify under the proposed RPS, but are deducted from retail electricity providers retail sales to calculate their renewable energy compliance obligations. The RPS would allow affected electricity providers to use any combination of the following to achieve the target: (1) generate their own renewable energy, (2) purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs), or (3) pay an alternative compliance payment of 3 cents per kilowatt hour (an effective safety-valve on the price of RECs). Distributed generators, such as rooftop photovoltaic systems, would earn triple credits for every kilowatt hour produced. The proposed RPS ramps up in a series of steps from 4% in 2011 to 20% in 2021 and continues at that level through 2039, before sunsetting (i.e., returning to zero). The legislation aims to prevent preemption of, or interference with, existing state RPS mandates that meet or exceed the federal requirement. We used NRELs Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) model to evaluate the impacts of the RPS requirements on the energy sector and considered design issues associated with renewable energy certificate (REC) trading markets.