Impacts of Green New Deal Energy Plans on Grid Stability, Costs, Jobs, Health, and Climate in 143 Countries

By Mark Z. Jacobson, M. Delucchi, M. A. Cameron, Stephen J. Coughlin, C. Hay, I. Manogaran, Yanbo Shu, Anna-Katharina von Krauland. One Earth, 2019

220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries. The roadmaps call for a 100% transition of all-purpose business-as-usual (BAU) energy to wind-water-solar (WWS) energy, efficiency, and storage by 2050 with at least 80% by 2030. Our studies on grid stability find that the countries, grouped into 24 regions, can match demand exactly from 2050 to 2052 with 100% WWS supply and storage. We also derive new cost metrics. Worldwide, WWS energy reduces end-use energy by 57.1%, aggregate private energy costs from $17.7 to $6.8 trillion/year (61%), and aggregate social (private plus health plus climate) costs from $76.1 to $6.8 trillion/year (91%) at a present value capital cost of ∼$73 trillion. WWS energy creates 28.6 million more long-term, full-time jobs than BAU energy and needs only ∼0.17% and ∼0.48% of land for new footprint and spacing, respectively. Thus, WWS requires less energy, costs less, and creates more jobs than does BAU.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Energy Engineering and Power Technology, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea3652c58fe9137a92481c18473117ddcf1402ee

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Citations in the corpus

Job creation during a climate compliant global energy transition across the power, heat, transport, and desalination sectors by 2050 (2022, methodology): “These results are validated by other studies such as Jacobson et al. [5,25,42], IEA [43], IRENA [27,28], Behrens et al. [44], Greenpeace [29], Dominish et al. [45], EPFL [46] among many others, which all tend to indicate that higher shares of renewables do have net positive impacts on employment.”
On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research (2022, methodology): “[13], [67]–[69], [195], are the only studies that consider solar PV tracking, leading to higher electricity yields and lower electricity generation cost, which is a major”