The elephant in the room: embodied emissions in our power sector

Abstract

Supporting rapid deployment of renewable power generation is a must to transition to a sustainable economy. Inaccurate accounting of greenhouse gas emissions will have detrimental consequences for our planet. Specifically, this study shows that: 1) ignoring embodied emissions in policy and planning will mean never actually reaching carbon neutrality, 2) carbon negative technologies are needed to actually reach net-zero, 3) fair and accurate decarbonization is even harder and more expensive than we are currently estimating. Ignoring embodied emissions is not only neglectful, but also leads to a suboptimal design of a decarbonized power sector. At deep levels of decarbonization, 20 gCO2-e/kWh, embodied emissions are over 50% of total system emissions. As our grid becomes cleaner, further reducing power sector emissions becomes even more challenging and expensive.