New whitepaper: Hurry or Wait?

Jürgen Weiss and Dean Murphy released a whitepaper with the Brattle Group on the national of energy switching. 

Climate change risk will likely require the decarbonization of our economy, in large part through investment in renewable generation. Since technological progress will likely lower the future cost of renewable generation capacity, however, delaying decarbonization could save money by benefitting from lower installation costs later. On the other hand, waiting to decarbonize would also impose costs: it would allow long-lived greenhouse gases to accumulate in the atmosphere, increasing long-term climate impacts. Reducing emissions sooner would cut the cumulative concentration of CO2 and reduce expected climate impacts. In addition, early reductions would provide insurance against the possibility of greater climate sensitivity, positive feedback loops, or points of no return and the resulting risks of catastrophic climate outcomes. In this paper, we develop a simple model of investment and technology cost evolution to shed light on the financial costs and carbon reduction benefits of two stylized strategies for deploying renewable generation to transform the electricity sector: “Hurry” vs. “Wait.”

Our fundamental question is whether it may be worth accelerating the replacement of existing fossil generators with renewables, when weighing the additional financial costs against the carbon benefits.

Download the whitepaper