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Thu, 4th Feb 2021 18:32:00 |
How To Get To Zero Carbon Emissions By 2050 |
Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of San Francisco (USF), and Evolved Energy Research have developed a blueprint to reduce US CO2 emissions to zero by 2050.
“By methodically increasing energy efficiency, switching to electric technologies, utilising clean electricity (especially wind and solar power), and deploying a small amount of carbon capture technology, the United States can reach zero emissions,” claim the researchers.
“The decarbonization of the U.S. energy system is fundamentally an infrastructure transformation,” says researcher Margaret Torn, “it means that by 2050 we need to build many gigawatts of wind and solar power plants, new transmission lines, a fleet of electric cars and light trucks, millions of heat pumps to replace conventional furnaces and water heaters, and more energy-efficient buildings – while continuing to research and innovate new technologies.”
In this transition, very little infrastructure would need “early retirement,” or replacement before the end of its economic life. “No one is asking consumers to switch out their brand-new car for an electric vehicle,” says Torn “the point is that efficient, low-carbon technologies need to be used when it comes time to replace the current equipment.”
The pathways studied have net costs ranging from 0.2% to 1.2% of GDP, with higher costs resulting from certain tradeoffs, such as limiting the amount of land given to solar and wind farms.
In the lowest-cost pathways, about 90% of electricity generation comes from wind and solar. One scenario showed that the U.S. can meet all its energy needs with 100% renewable energy (solar, wind, and bioenergy), but it would cost more and require greater land use.
“We were pleasantly surprised that the cost of the transformation is lower now than in similar studies we did five years ago, even though this achieves much more ambitious carbon reduction,” adds Torn. “The main reason is that the cost of wind and solar power and batteries for electric vehicles have declined faster than expected.”
The scenarios were generated using new energy models complete with details of both energy consumption and production – such as the entire U.S. building stock, vehicle fleet, power plants and more – for 16 geographic regions in the U.S. Costs were calculated using projections for fossil fuel and renewable energy prices from DOE Annual Energy Outlook and the NREL Annual Technology Baseline report.
The cost figures would be lower still if they included the economic and climate benefits of decarbonizing our energy systems. The economic costs of the scenarios are almost exclusively capital costs from building new infrastructure.
“All that infrastructure build equates to jobs, and potentially jobs in the U.S., as opposed to sending money overseas to buy oil from other countries,” points out Torn.
For the next 10 years the need is to increase generation and transmission of renewable energy, make sure all new infrastructure, such as cars and buildings, are low carbon, and maintain current natural gas capacity for now for reliability.
The US could become a source of negative CO2 emissions by mid-century, meaning more carbon dioxide is taken out of the atmosphere than added, say the researchers.
With higher levels of carbon capture, biofuels, and electric fuels, the U.S. energy and industrial system could be “net negative” to the tune of 500 metric tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere each year. (This would require more electricity generation, land use, and interstate transmission to achieve).
The authors calculated the cost of this net negative pathway to be 0.6% of GDP – only slightly higher than the main carbon-neutral pathway cost of 0.4% of GDP. “This is affordable to society just on energy grounds alone,” Williams said.
When combined with increasing CO2 uptake by the land, mainly by changing agricultural and forest management practices, the researchers calculated that the net negative emissions scenario would put the U.S. on track with a global trajectory to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350 parts per million (ppm) at some distance in the future.
The 350-ppm endpoint of this global trajectory has been described by many scientists as what would be needed to stabilize the climate at levels similar to pre-industrial times.
The study was supported in part by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, an initiative of the United Nations.
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