Addressing Energy Technologies and Policies that Shape Future Sustainability

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Trancik’s group has also looked at the evolution of both solar and wind energy in recent decades — and the potential for future expansion of these technologies in the future through climate change mitigation policies and national agreements. The report notes that solar and wind energy costs have dropped rapidly over the past few decades, as markets for these technologies have grown at rates far exceeding the original predictions. In the case of solar energy, for example, the cost of reducing emissions by replacing coal-fired electricity with photovoltaics has fallen at least 50-fold since 1976.

Modeling to understand outcomes of energy and climate policies

Policies directed at cutting carbon emissions from sources like power plants and vehicles can reduce rates of some of the health problems that are associated with air pollution. Research from Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor Noelle Selin and her team looked not only at the potential health benefits of some carbon-reduction reduction policies, but also at the economic implications of these health benefits. The researchers looked at three climate policies achieving the same level of carbon reductions in the U.S.: a clean-energy standard, a transportation policy, and a cap-and-trade program. They compared the health benefits of each with the economic costs.

The team found that the health-related benefits could offset 26 percent of the cost to implement a transportation policy — and could equal more than ten times the cost of implementing a cap-and-trade program. This difference primarily reflects the large differences in the costs of the programs. Overall, policies aimed at specific sources of air pollution, such as power plants and vehicles, did not lead to substantially larger benefits than cheaper policies, such as a cap-and-trade approach.

Selin, along with MIT Sloan School of Management Assistant Professor Valerie Karplus and their research teams have developed a model that connects a model of China’s provincial energy economy with an air chemistry model to look at how changes in energy policy translate into changes in projected emissions and air quality impacts, and examine impacts on human health and the economy.

“As countries work to implement their commitments under the recent Paris agreement to address climate change, our methods can help them find solutions that can have clear near-term benefits,” says Selin. “Air pollution represents a substantial challenge throughout the world, and our goal is to inform strategies that can be used to improve human health. This work shows how modeling and analysis techniques can inform real-world policy problems.”