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Goforth, Teagan

Publications and source records attributed to Goforth, Teagan.

Tax Credits for Clean Electricity: The Distributional Impacts of Supply-Push Policies in the Power Sector

We evaluate distributional and efficiency consequences of the bulk power clean electricity tax credits authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. To do so, we link detailed electricity capacity expansion, computable general equilibrium, microsimulation, and air pollution models to estimate economic welfare and health incidence across demographic groups. We evaluate trade-offs between policy efficiency and income progressivity by comparing the tax credits to cap-and-trade policies. The tax credits encourage increased clean electricity investment, resulting in a reallocation of capital from elsewhere in the economy, higher prices for capital and other goods, lower power prices, and lower emissions. The tax credits yield progressive outcomes for economic welfare at the expense of efficiency while all modeled policies demonstrate progressivity in health impacts. The health benefits, absent climate benefits, exceed total policy costs and provide greater benefits for low-income and historically marginalized households given coincidence of household locations and emissions exposure intensity.

distributional impacts↗

HIPSTER (Harmonized Impacts across Products, Scenarios, and Technologies for Environmental and Resource metrics) [SWR-24-17]

Development of a prototype, code-based life cycle assessment framework, the Harmonized Impacts across Products, Scenarios, and Technologies for Environmental and Resource metrics (HIPSTER), to coherently assess outputs of prospective NREL models across environmental and resource use metrics. Eventually, HIPSTER is aimed to also cover socioeconomic and justice metrics. At present, NREL model scenario impact assessments are performed incoherently, as they as based on varying assumptions and inputs, specifically life cycle inventories, and cover different system boundaries. HIPSTER was created to align the assumptions and boundaries with those of cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment. In FY22, HIPSTER was successfully applied using scenarios from the ReEDS™ model, NREL's flagship capacity expansion model resulting in cradle-to-grace time-series life cycle impacts across LCA midpoints and resource use metrics.

Ghosh, Tapajyoti↗

Tax Credits for Clean Electricity: The Distributional Impacts of Supply-Push Policies in the Power Sector

We evaluate distributional and efficiency consequences of the bulk power clean electricity tax credits authorized by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. To do so, we link detailed electricity capacity expansion, computable general equilibrium, data-rich microsimulation, and air pollution models to estimate the policy incidence in terms of economic welfare and health impacts across a wide range of demographic groups. We evaluate the tradeoff between policy efficiency and income progressivity by comparing the tax credits to cap-and-trade policies that vary revenue recycling approaches. Under the scenarios analyzed the bulk power tax credits lead to increased clean electricity technology deployment resulting in a reallocation of capital from elsewhere in the economy, higher prices for capital and other goods, lower power prices, and lower emissions. The tax credits yield progressive outcomes for both economic welfare and health impacts. The health benefits exceed total policy costs and provide greater benefits for low-income and historically-marginalized households given the coincidence of household and emission source locations.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Comparison of temporal resolution selection approaches in energy systems models

Capacity expansion models for the power sector are used to project future decisions over the coming decades by simulating investment and operation decisions for the use of electricity. Due to model performance constraints, these models typically do not explicitly simulate every hour within a year, but instead simulate representative time segments (groups of hours). This paper evaluates different approaches for selecting time segments across three methods: sequential, categorical, and clustering, across a wide range of time-segment quantities, for a total of 204 temporal profiles. To measure the performance of each profile's ability to accurately represent data, the root-mean-square-error of each profile's time segments are compared to the data's original hourly data. The temporal alignment across regions is also measured (i.e., how often windy days align across regions). Different spatial resolutions were applied for a subset of the temporal selection methods to investigate the impact spatial resolution has on performance. This paper provides a framework for measuring the value of different temporal selection methods and of adding more granular data to energy system models. Overall, multi-criteria clustering yields the lowest root-mean-square-error across all datasets evaluated and provides a holistic view of the intertwined relationships between renewable generation and electricity demand.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗