Experts from industry, government and academia agree that sound policy is critical in reaching net-zero emissions in the U.S. Opinions on what those policies would look like, however, vary widely.

A group of those experts convened Wednesday to present their ideas on policies for a carbon-free future in a webinar covering four recent reports, hosted by High-Impact Events.

The reports have some common elements, including decarbonizing electricity generation by 2035 and the need to accurately price carbon. They also differ on some issues, such as the amount of capital investment that is needed in the net-zero transition.

Accelerating US Clean Energy

A team of researchers from the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI) at University of Colorado Boulder released a report in December that looks at solutions for rapid decarbonization by sector.

In their approach, the authors focused on the status of current technologies and their ability to help the U.S. stop burning fossil fuels, said Charles Kutscher, co-author and director of the Buildings and Thermal Systems Center at RASEI.

The report, “Accelerating the U.S. Clean Energy Transformation: Challenges and Solutions,” identifies supporting technologies for achieving the energy transition across electricity generation, buildings, transportation and industry.

An analysis of each sector includes a wide range of policy recommendations, including:

• retiring existing coal plants and ending construction of new natural gas-fired generation capacity;
• adopting a national building energy/carbon code;
• enacting a national moratorium on sales of light- and medium-duty internal combustion vehicles by 2030; and
• strengthening federal RD&D efforts for reducing the cost of renewable hydrogen production and hydrogen storage.

The report takes a deep dive into options for removing carbon dioxide from the air to complement net-zero efforts. Kutscher said carbon capture will be as important as emissions reductions in limiting average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius.

Direct air capture with carbon storage (DACCS) is among the technologies identified in the report as gaining attention in the sector. Biden’s recently announced infrastructure plan includes an expansion of tax credits that would make it easier to use the credits for DACCS technology. (See Biden Infrastructure Plan Would Boost Clean Energy.)

Pulling carbon out of the air with direct air capture requires passing air through exchange devices and geologically sequestering the carbon dioxide.

At a cost of $100 to $300/metric tonne of CO2, DACCS is the most expensive carbon capture technology reviewed in the report, Kutscher said. The process, he added, should not be deployed where it would compete for power with renewables that are being used to displace fossil fuels.

The report recommended using carbon pricing to help support development of pilot DACCS plants in the U.S.

The Zero-carbon Plan

Put together by the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network, America’s Zero Carbon Action Plan (ZCAP) is based on a simple idea: set your goal — a zero-carbon economy by 2050 — and then “backcast” to determine the best options for getting there using a lot of number crunching and computer modeling.

“What’s been missing is a real strategy for transition, particularly for a just transition, and in that regard, we need to focus on job creation,” said Dan Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and one of the nearly 100 academics and experts who worked on the plan. “Our proposal looks in particular at rejuvenation of the heartland of America, of the Appalachian region [and] in the Midwest. This is absolutely essential to not just the reality of delivering deep decarbonization, but to the politics of making this possible.”

Echoing other reports, the ZCAP says getting to zero carbon by 2050 means a massively accelerated ramp-up of both clean power and the electrification of transportation and buildings by 2030. About three and a half times more solar and wind will be needed, while coal-fired generation must drop to less than 1%, said Jamil Farbes, a principal with industry consultants Evolved Energy Research. An additional 20 GW of storage will be needed, but gas generation must stay flat, he said.

Farbes estimated the incremental costs for reaching zero carbon by 2050 at 0.2 to 1.2% of gross domestic product, which is considerably less than historical energy spending as a share of GDP.

The transition to zero carbon will also create about 4 million jobs over the next decade, versus a loss of 304,000 jobs — about 30,000 a year — across all fossil fuels, said Robert Pollin, co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The just transition that will be needed for these workers “includes job guarantees, pension guarantees, income support, retraining support [and] relocations, and this is for each and every person that is going to experience dislocation,” Pollin said.

The cost, he said, will be about $1.5 billion a year up to 2030 and $3.8 billion per year between 2031 and 2050 because of increasing layoffs in the oil and gas industry, “This is less than one-hundredth of 1% of average GDP over this period,” Pollin said.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, was optimistic about the next steps, saying that President Biden’s American Jobs Plan and the Democrats’ CLEAN Future Act now before Congress are well aligned with the ZCAP’s goals and strategy. (See Biden Infrastructure Plan Would Boost Clean Energy.)

“Getting to zero by 2050 requires that all new investment has to be clean as soon as you roll off the old, fossil fuel-based capital stock,” Sachs said. “We’re in a changeover where we are going to be retiring old capital and replacing it with new capital, and we just need to set the timelines so that all new capital coming in is consistent with the 2050 timeline.”

Grassroots Policy

The grassroots volunteer organization Clean Energy for Biden last year compiled 48 policy papers to help legislators identify potential federal decarbonization policies.

Together, the papers present a diverse set of recommendations on everything from infrastructure to finance, to job creation in communities to rebuilding schools, said Zoe Elizabeth, energy service lead at Silicon Valley Clean Energy.

One of the papers, called Energy Efficiency and Demand Flexibility in the Built Environment, identified the important role energy efficiency should continue to have in decarbonizing the economy.

Core recommendations in the paper align with federal jurisdiction and tackle “some of the biggest systemic opportunities for accelerating efficiency given limited time,” said Carmen Best, co-author and director of policy and emerging markets at ReCurve.

Those recommendations include deploying digital tools to make demand flexible and standardizing carbon accounting.

Digital metering infrastructure is key to future energy efficiency measures, but utilities have not leveraged the full value of smart meters yet, according to Best.

“Energy data infrastructure, including tracking and sharing of consumption data, is essential to enable transactions and drive investment in distributed energy resources so we can maximize their value as a grid resource,” she said.

The paper also recommends developing a carbon accounting hub to increase transparency of the carbon intensity of the grid nationwide.

The hub, Best said, would enable buildings and customers to be more responsive to grid conditions.

Another paper, “Policies to Support Cities’ Climate Goals,” targeted opportunities to build out existing federal programs to support decarbonization at the local level, said Nicole Pavia, co-author and senior contributing analyst at Energy Futures Initiative.

The paper focused on sustainable buildings, clean transportation, industrial investments and climate adaptation.

With many U.S. cities requiring commercial buildings to benchmark their energy consumption, the paper suggested the federal government could do more to support and encourage benchmarking efforts nationwide, Pavia said.

The paper further recommended that the federal government develop a voluntary building performance standard that could be adopted easily at the city and town levels.

“The federal government can play an important role here, providing incentives for cities and states to strengthen their building codes, support the move to all electric buildings and assist in the development of stretch codes that exceed state and local mandated codes,” she said.

[Editor’s Note: The webinar also included information about the report “Accelerating Decarbonization of the U.S. Energy System.” See Report: ‘Social Contract’ Needed for Decarbonization.]