Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100% penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes.

This study addresses the greatest concern facing the large-scale integration of wind, water, and solar (WWS) into a power grid: the high cost of avoiding load loss caused by WWS variability and uncertainty. It uses a new grid integration model and finds low-cost, no-load-loss, nonunique solutions to this problem on electrification of all US energy sectors (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) while accounting for wind and solar time series data from a 3D global weather model that simulates extreme events and competition among wind turbines for available kinetic energy. Solutions are obtained by prioritizing storage for heat (in soil and water); cold (in ice and water); and electricity (in phase-change materials, pumped hydro, hydropower, and hydrogen), and using demand response. No natural gas, biofuels, nuclear power, or stationary batteries are needed. The resulting 2050-2055 US electricity social cost for a full system is much less than for fossil fuels. These results hold for many conditions, suggesting that low-cost, reliable 100% WWS systems should work many places worldwide.

Impacts of biofuels on climate change, water use, and land use.

Governments worldwide are promoting the development of biofuels in order to mitigate the climate impact of using fuels. In this article, I discuss the impacts of biofuels on climate change, water use, and land use. I discuss the overall metric by which these impacts have been measured and then present and discuss estimates of the impacts. In spite of the complexities of the environmental and technological systems that affect climate change, land use, and water use, and the difficulties of constructing useful metrics, it is possible to make some qualitative overall assessments. It is likely that biofuels produced from crops using conventional agricultural practices will not mitigate the impacts of climate change and will exacerbate stresses on water supplies, water quality, and land use, compared with petroleum fuels. Policies should promote the development of sustainable biofuel programs that have very low inputs of fossil fuels and chemicals that rely on rainfall or abundant groundwater, and that use land with little or no economic or ecological value in alternative uses.

The health and visibility cost of air pollution: a comparison of estimation methods.

Air pollution from motor vehicles, electricity-generating plants, industry, and other sources can harm human health, injure crops and forests, damage building materials, and impair visibility. Economists sometimes analyze the social cost of these impacts, in order to illuminate tradeoffs, compare alternatives, and promote efficient use of scarce resource. In this paper, we compare estimates of the health and visibility costs of air pollution derived from a meta-hedonic price analysis, with an estimate of health costs derived from a damage-function analysis and an estimate of the visibility cost derived from contingent valuation. We find that the meta-hedonic price analysis produces an estimate of the health cost that lies at the low end of the range of damage-function estimates. This is consistent with hypotheses that on the one hand, hedonic price analysis does not capture all of the health costs of air pollution (because individuals may not be fully informed about all of the health effects), and that on the other hand, the value of mortality used in the high-end damage function estimates is too high. The analysis of the visibility cost of air pollution derived from a meta-hedonic price analysis produces an estimate that is essentially identical to an independent estimate based on contingent valuation. This close agreement lends some credence to the estimates. We then apply the meta hedonic-price model to estimate the visibility cost per kilogram of motor vehicle emissions.