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Inter-temporal R&D and capital investment portfolios for the electricity industry’s low carbon future

Nidhi R. Santen, Mort D. Webster, David Popp, and Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga

Year: 2017
Volume: Volume 38
Number: Number 6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5547/01956574.38.6.nsan
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Abstract:
A pressing question facing policy makers today in developing a long-term strategy to manage carbon emissions from the electric power sector is how to appropriately balance investment in R&D for driving innovation in emerging low-and zero-carbon technologies with investment in commercially available technologies for meeting existing energy needs. Likewise, policy makers need to determine how to allocate limited funding across multiple technologies. Unfortunately, existing modeling tools to study these questions lack a realistic representation of electric power system operations, the innovation process, or both. In this paper, we present a new modeling framework for long-term R&D and electricity generation capacity planning that combines an economic representation of endogenous non-linear technical change with a detailed representation of the power system. The model captures the complementary nature of technologies in the power sector; physical integration constraints of the system; and the opportunity to build new knowledge capital as a non-linear function of R&D and accumulated knowledge, reflective of the diminishing marginal returns to research inherent in the energy innovation process. Through a series of numerical experiments and sensitivity analyses - with and without carbon policy - we show how using frameworks that do not incorporate these features can over-or under-estimate the value of different emerging technologies, and potentially misrepresent the cost-effectiveness of R&D opportunities.



Coal-Biomass Co-firing within Renewable Portfolio Standards: Strategic Adoption by Heterogeneous Firms and Emissions Implications

Brayam Valqui, Mort D. Webster, Shanxia Sun, and Thomas W. Hertel

Year: 2023
Volume: Volume 44
Number: Number 5
DOI: 10.5547/01956574.44.4.bval
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Abstract:
As electricity from coal declines, co-firing coal plants with biomass has been proposed to extend coal unit life, increase production, and reduce carbon emissions. Previous studies reach conflicting conclusions on whether coal biomass co-firing would result in a net increase or decrease in carbon emissions. We explore whether biomass co-firing would decrease emissions using a novel framework that includes two critical features of electricity markets: strategic adoption decisions by firms and intertemporal constraints on power plant operations. We apply this framework to a case study based on the Midwestern U.S. electricity market and show that profit maximizing firms will retrofit mid-efficiency coal units, rather than the most or least efficient units. We demonstrate that, contrary to expectations, this strategy leads to a net increase in system-wide carbon emissions under high carbon prices because of the other generators displaced by co-firing units.





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