摘要:
A growing number of governments and companies are pledging net-zero emissions by 2050. For the US as a whole to achieve this requires eliminating or offsetting today's emission of ~6 billion tCO2e/year. There is a dearth of analysis for understanding requirements, costs, and impacts of this transition. The goal of this study is to help fill this gap by providing insights at visceral, human scales of how the nation will look following a pathway to net-zero and the localized benefits, costs, and impacts for different industries, professions, and communities. The analysis aims to inform debates on public and corporate policies needed to achieve net-zero, but specific policy recommendations are not offered.Energy service demands projected to 2050 by the EIA for 14 regions across the continental US provide the starting point for modeling. Five different pathways are constructed for meeting these demands by varying exogenously applied constraints to create the different pathways.End-use technologies to meet service demands are exogenously specified in 5-year time steps to determine final energy demands that must be delivered by the energy supply system. Pathways to net-zero emissions by 2050 are constructed by finding the energy supply mix that minimizes the 30-year NPV of total energy-system costs, subject to exogenous constraints. The model has perfect foresight and seamless integration between all sectors. These modeling results are “downscaled” to state or sub-state geographies to quantify local plant and infrastructure investments, construction activities, land-use, jobs, and health impacts, 2020 - 2050.
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