EPIC Releases Climate Planning Working Paper

San Diego (January 13, 2015) – The Energy Policy Initiatives Center (EPIC) recently released a working paper that suggests a method to allocate greenhouse gas emissions within the electricity sector between measures that reduce overall consumption (efficiency) and those that make every unit of energy cleaner (renewable content requirements). 

Based on significant experience developing greenhouse gas inventories and climate action plans, EPIC staff realized that there was an analytical tradeoff when estimating the emissions reductions from efficiency and those from policies like the renewable portfolio standard in California. One reduces the total amount of energy used and the other reduces the carbon dioxide content of electricity supplies. Both reduce greenhouse gases but are interrelated. Previous approaches calculated one first and then the other. In the working paper, entitled Splitting the Electric Baby: A Methodology for Allocating Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions within the Electricity Sector, EPIC has proposed a method that allocates total savings from these two related policy types that accounts for their relative contribution, thus more accurately allocating emissions.

Such allocation is important for demonstrating compliance with reduction targets from specific policies. This method may also have applications in determining compliance with US Environmental Protection Agencies proposed power plant efficiency regulations.