Electricity Production and Emissions Simulation

The purpose of this portion of the project is to link electricity demands with electricity sector emissions, with a focus on NOx. Climate change will alter the level and timing of electricity demands, as well as the thermal efficiency of electricity generating units. With a given capital stock of generating plant (short run analysis), this will change their operations and emissions. Even in the presence of seasonal or annual emissions caps, emissions might then increase during the warmest days when ozone episodes are most likely to occur. In the long run, the mix and amounts of various types of generation technologies will adjust, and if climate change occurs, the resulting generation plant will be different than if climate change does not occur. This has further implications for the timing and amount of emissions. This portion of the research project developed and demonstrated methods for obtaining temporal and spatial distributions of NOx emissions from power plants, and for quantifying the effects of climate change scenarios on those distributions. In Section 1 of this report, we provide background on the analyses, as well as summarize data sources. In Section 2, we describe the methodology used to assess the effects of climate warming assuming short-run (fixed capital) conditions for the power generatio