Electricity generation is the globe’s biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, mainly from coal-fired power plants. State renewables goals, called renewable portfolio standards (RPS), aim to cut the percentage of a state’s electricity that comes from burning fossil fuels. In the U.S., electricity generation represents about 31 percent of the country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
“In general terms, we certainly find that RPS programs in 2013 reduced greenhouse gas emissions providing important climate change reduction benefits,” Ryan Wiser, a senior scientist focusing on energy markets and policy at Berkeley Lab, said. “The scale of the climate change ‘problem’ is enormous, if we are to believe the IPCC, and existing state RPS programs have just scratched the surface.”
The Berkeley report focuses on the most recent year for which data is available — 2013. That year, 2.3 percent of U.S. electricity came from low-carbon sources such as wind and solar that were built to meet renewable portfolio standards. Those sources resulted in a 3.6 percent reduction in total electricity produced from fossil fuels nationally, the report says.
The standards led to a 59 million metric ton reduction in greenhouse gas emissions across the states with the renewables standards, supporting 200,000 renewable energy jobs there. Total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2013 were nearly 6.7 billion metric tons.
Coal-fired power plants use a lot of water for cooling, so less water is consumed for electric power generation when states switch to renewables. Water consumption in states with RPS standards fell by 27 billion gallons because of renewables use, or roughly 2 percent of total U.S. power sector water consumption.
Read more at States’ Electricity Goals Have Limited Reach: Study
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