Accelerating Decarbonization Of The U S Energy System

The world is transforming its energy system from one dominated by fossil fuel combustion to one with net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary anthropogenic greenhouse gas. This energy transition is critical to mitigating climate change, protecting human health, and revitalizing the U.S. economy. To help policymakers, businesses, communities, and the public better understand what a net-zero transition would mean for the United States, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine convened a committee of experts to investigate how the U.S. could best decarbonize its transportation, electricity, buildings, and industrial sectors. This report, Accelerating Decarbonization of the United States Energy System, identifies key technological and socio-economic goals that must be achieved to put the United States on the path to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The report presents a policy blueprint outlining critical near-term actions for the first decade (2021-2030) of this 30-year effort, including ways to support communities that will be most impacted by the transition.

Addressing climate change is essential and possible, and it offers a host of benefits - from better public health to new economic opportunities. The United States has a historic opportunity to lead the way in decarbonization by transforming its current energy system to one with net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide. Recent legislation has set the nation on the path to reach its goal of net zero by 2050 in order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. However, even if implemented as designed, current policy will get the United States only part of the way to its net-zero goal. Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States provides a comprehensive set of actionable recommendations to help policymakers achieve a just and equitable energy transition over the next decade and beyond, including policy, technology, and societal dimensions. This report addresses federal and subnational policy needs to overcome implementation barriers and gaps with a focus on energy justice, workforce development, public health, and public engagement. The report also presents a suite of recommendations for the electricity, transportation, built environment, industrial, fossil fuels, land use, and finance sectors.

While progress has been made in the development of decarbonization technologies, much work remains in scale-up and deployment. For decarbonization technologies to reach meaningful scale, real-world constraints, societal, economic, and political, must be considered. To identify the primary challenges and opportunities to deploying decarbonization technologies at scale across major sectors of the U.S. economy, the Board on Energy and Environmental Systems of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a workshop on July 22-23, 2019. In addition to technology-specific and sector-specific studies, the workshop considered the types of societal transformations required, as well as potential policy drivers for carbon dioxide emissions reductions. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop.

The United Kingdom is committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least eighty per cent by 2050, a target that will only be achieved by transforming the way that energy is supplied and used. At the same time there are anxieties about the security of energy provision in terms of European dependency on natural gas and the reliability of electricity supply. This book explores in detail those factors which could help or hinder the attainment of the UK's climate change targets, and how these factors interact with the parallel objective of maintaining a robust and secure energy system. The book is the result of a major national energy research effort by the UK Energy Research Centre, which includes some of the UK's leading energy experts. The results and recommendations are essential reading for policymakers, professionals, researchers, and anyone concerned with achieving large-scale reductions in carbon emissions, both from the UK and internationally. Energy 2050 begins by exploring the evolution of the UK energy system over recent decades: the trends, technologies and environmental impacts related to energy use, and the structures and institutions of governance that have influenced this evolution. It then moves on to changes in energy policy to emphasise decarbonization and resilience, and introduce the approach to scenarios and modelling used in the rest of the book. Later chapters explore different aspects of the uncertainties that may enable or constrain the creation of a low-carbon, resilient UK energy system, related to accelerated technology development, the creation of an infrastructure to support de-centralized energy and microgeneration, to lifestyle and behaviour change, and to public attitudes to wider environmental impacts associated with energy system change.

Environmental engineers support the well-being of people and the planet in areas where the two intersect. Over the decades the field has improved countless lives through innovative systems for delivering water, treating waste, and preventing and remediating pollution in air, water, and soil. These achievements are a testament to the multidisciplinary, pragmatic, systems-oriented approach that characterizes environmental engineering. Environmental Engineering for the 21st Century: Addressing Grand Challenges outlines the crucial role for environmental engineers in this period of dramatic growth and change. The report identifies five pressing challenges of the 21st century that environmental engineers are uniquely poised to help advance: sustainably supply food, water, and energy; curb climate change and adapt to its impacts; design a future without pollution and waste; create efficient, healthy, resilient cities; and foster informed decisions and actions.

Americans' safety, productivity, comfort, and convenience depend on the reliable supply of electric power. The electric power system is a complex "cyber-physical" system composed of a network of millions of components spread out across the continent. These components are owned, operated, and regulated by thousands of different entities. Power system operators work hard to assure safe and reliable service, but large outages occasionally happen. Given the nature of the system, there is simply no way that outages can be completely avoided, no matter how much time and money is devoted to such an effort. The system's reliability and resilience can be improved but never made perfect. Thus, system owners, operators, and regulators must prioritize their investments based on potential benefits. Enhancing the Resilience of the Nation's Electricity System focuses on identifying, developing, and implementing strategies to increase the power system's resilience in the face of events that can cause large-area, long-duration outages: blackouts that extend over multiple service areas and last several days or longer. Resilience is not just about lessening the likelihood that these outages will occur. It is also about limiting the scope and impact of outages when they do occur, restoring power rapidly afterwards, and learning from these experiences to better deal with events in the future.

Overview of how decisions by China on climate, energy, and environmental policy will influence the country's capacity to decarbonize.