This report is one of a suite of products aiming to provide a consistent set of technology cost and performance data, and to define a scenario framework that can be used in forward-looking electricity analyses by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) and others. The long-term objective of this effort is to identify a range of possible futures for the U.S. electricity sector that illuminate specific energy system issues by (1) defining a set of prospective scenarios that bound ranges of technology, market, and policy assumptions and (2) assessing these scenarios in NREL's market models to understand the range of resulting outcomes, including energy technology deployment and production, energy prices, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.This effort, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), focuses on the electric sector by creating a technology cost and performance database, defining scenarios, documenting associated assumptions, and generating results using NREL's Regional Energy Deployment Systems (ReEDS) and dGen models (see
AcknowledgmentsWe gratefully acknowledge the many people whose efforts contributed to this report. The ReEDS modeling and analysis team at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) was active in developing and testing the ReEDS model v.2018. We also acknowledge the vast number of current and past NREL employees on and beyond the ReEDS team who have participated in data and model development, testing, and analysis. We are especially grateful to Walter Short who first envisioned and developed the Wind Deployment System (WinDS) and ReEDS models. We thank for their comments and improvements on successive versions of this report. Finally, we are grateful to all those who helped sponsor ReEDS model development and analysis, particularly supporters from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) but also others who have funded our work over the years.
This study evaluates pathways and quantifies the costs of transitioning to a 100% renewable energy (RE) power system for the contiguous United States. That cost depends on future system conditions (e.g., low versus high RE costs), the definition of the 100% requirement (e.g., whether the requirement applies to end-use demand or total generation), and the time frame for reaching 100%.
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