Evaluating a Proposed 20% National Renewable Portfolio Standard

Abstract

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 providers-those selling less than 4 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) per year-and 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 NREL's 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. Preliminary findings include:• After removing the small-utility exemptions and assuming that the maximum 25% energy efficiency allowance is fully used, the 20% RPS has an effective renewable requirement equal to 12% of total U.S. retail sales in 2021. The assumption that the energy efficiency component of the target would be fully used before adding new renewable energy supply, due to its cost-effective nature, will be further evaluated in follow-on work.• The base case scenario estimates that qualifying renewable generators will provide about 9% of the national load in 2021, much of that due to existing state RPS mandates. Thus, the proposed national legislation would require about 3% more generation from qualifying renewables beyond the state RPS mandates by 2021. In this sense, the proposed legislation does not represent a significant stretch beyond existing state policy in aggregate, although ramp-up additions in years that transition from one RPS level to another can present challenges.• Based on the assumptions used in this analysis, wind power capacity expands to approximately 129 gigawatts (GW) in 2030 in the RPS scenario, up from about 117iii GW in the base case. Concentrating solar power (CSP) capacity remains virtually unchanged at 32 GW that year, while dis...

A Prospective Analysis of the Costs, Benefits, and Impacts of U.S. Renewable Portfolio Standards

“…Prospective cost-effectiveness evaluations for several states have also been conducted in concert with major revisions to state RPS programs (e.g., Rouhani et al 2016). Prospective studies with a national scope have focused primarily on the potential effects of a national RPS or clean energy standard (EIA 2012;Goulder et al 2016;Logan et al 2009;Mignone et al 2012;Paul et al 2014). To date, however, we are aware of no prior work that has sought to prospectively evaluate the cost and benefits of all state RPS programs in aggregate.…”

“…Other generation technologies are also estimated to experience cost declines of varying levels as reported in the Annual Technology Baseline 2016 data. Storage and transmission costs are based 5 ReEDS has been widely used in previous analysis of long-term renewable futures (DOE 2015(DOE , 2016Wiser et al 2016a;NREL 2012) and to simulate scenarios for analyses of a broad range of state and federal energy policies and regulations Cole et al 2015;Lantz et al 2014;Mignone et al 2012;Bird et al 2011;Logan et al 2009 Eurek et al 2016). All three model scenarios-No RPS, Existing RPS, and High RE-rely on the same set of assumptions.…”

A spatially and temporally resolved model of the electricity grid – Economic vs environmental dispatch

“…A.2 and are compared to those of 2010. The error bars are used to compare the results of LCOE from this study to those calculated in the literature [68,[71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78].…”

Modeling Future Life-Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Environmental Impacts of Electricity Supplies in Brazil

“…For many newer sources such as biomass, wind, and solar power, literature sources provide more updated information. Data on power plant construction costs were taken from studies by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and were accessed using the OpenEI tool [37][38][39]. The full listing of LCA data sources can be seen in Table A1, with a table of median unit impacts and distributions available in Table A2.…”