plutus: An R package to calculate electricity investments and stranded assets from the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM)

Abstract

plutus is an R package that post-processes outputs from the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM;Calvin et al., 2019) to calculate the power sector capital investment costs and stranded asset costs associated with GCAM projections of electricity generation by technology. GCAM is a market equilibrium model used to examine the dynamics of the coupled human-Earth system and the response of this system to global change, including socioeconomics, technology, climate, and policy. GCAM tracks electricity generation by technology and vintage over 32 geopolitical regions throughout the lifetime of each generating technology. plutus extends GCAM functionality by (1) estimating the foregone economic value of prematurely retired power plants as a result of economic-induced retirements compared to scheduled lifetimes; and (2) estimating the new installations and capital investments driven by future changes in economic, energy, agriculture, and land-use systems in GCAM. The concept and methodology for calculating electricity investments and stranded assets is detailed in Binsted et al. (2020) and Iyer et al. (2017). Zhao et al., (2021). plutus: An R package to calculate electricity investments and stranded assets from the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM).

Exploring the investment cost of construction of renewable power plant considering the effect of climate impact

“…As a result, heating (cooling) degree days indicates the number of days over the year that the average temperature is below (above) 18 degrees centigrade and amount of this difference. The estimation of the cost of construction of new renewable power plants as well as the cost of left stranded fossil-fuel power plants is down using a R package called "Plutus" developed by Zhao et al [7]. The analysis is carried out using the Global Change Analysis Model [8].…”

Large ensemble exploration of global energy transitions under national emissions pledges

“…Refer to (Hartin et al, 2021) for details on the methodology. Climate-impacted electricity supply generated from wind and solar PV was also considered but ultimately excluded from this study, as previous work found potential climate impacts and their associated uncertainty to have only a modest impact on future generation compared to other uncertainties considered (Santos Da Silva et al, 2021;Zapata et al, 2022).…”

“…Energy Burden is calculated in each region as per capita spending on residential energy use divided by per capita GDP, and is a widely used metric for energy equity and energy justice considerations (Baker et al, 2023). Capacity Investments and Stranded Assets are economic metrics reporting the costs of new capacity additions and premature capacity retirements in the power sector, respectively, due to implementing climate pledges (Binsted et al, 2020;Iyer et al, 2015b;Zhao et al, 2021). Finally, Level of CO2 Removal and LUC Emissions quantify the global CO2 budget pathway for mitigation in each realization.…”

“…Results from individual regions can be summed. Stranded assets are computed from GCAM outputs using the "plutus" R package (Zhao et al, 2021).…”

“…This metric gives one angle of a policy's economic impacts, and can be split by technology. Capacity investments are computed from GCAM outputs using the "plutus" R package (Zhao et al, 2021).…”