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Electricity and water systems in the Western US (WUS) are closely connected, with hydropower comprising 20% of total annual WUS generation, and electricity related to water comprising about 7% of total WUS electricity use. Because of these interdependencies, the threat of climate change to WUS resources will likely have compounding electricity impacts on the Western Interconnect grid. This study describes a WUS‐wide water system model with a particular emphasis on estimating climate impacts on hydropower generation and water‐related electricity use, which can be linked with a grid expansion model to support climate‐resilient electricity planning. The water system model combines climatically‐driven physical hydrology and management of both water supply and demand allocation, and is applied to an ensemble of 15 climate scenarios out to 2050. Model results show decreasing streamflow in key basins of the WUS under most scenarios. Annual water‐related electricity use increases up to 4%, and by up to 6% during the summer months, driven by growing agricultural demands met increasingly through a shift toward energy‐intensive groundwater to replace declining surface water. Total annual hydropower generation changes by +5% to −20% by mid‐century but declines in most scenarios, with decreases in summer generation by up to nearly −30%. Water‐related electricity use increases tend to coincide with hydropower generation declines, annually and seasonally, demonstrating the importance of concurrently evaluating the climate signal on both water‐for‐energy and energy‐for‐water to inform planning for grid reliability and decarbonization goals. Plain Language Summary: Electricity and water systems in the Western United States (WUS) have a strong dependency. Water fuels hydropower generation and electricity is used to pump, transport, treat, heat, and dispose of water. Climate change poses a serious threat to water availability in the WUS and is likely to also affect hydropower generation and electricity use related to water. This study develops a WUS water system model to evaluate the impact of a set of climate change scenarios on the dynamic interplay between water availability and demand and hydropower generation and electricity use by the water sector by 2050. We find that in many key basins, streamflow decreases under the climate scenarios. At the same time, reliance on groundwater increases to meet growing agricultural water demand. Hydropower generation shows decreases in most cases while energy use related to water increases. Because these hydropower generation declines tend to occur during periods when electricity demand for water grows, electricity grid planners in the Western Interconnect will benefit from this type of study by informing future grid buildouts that maintain reliability and decarbonization goals. Key Points: Interactions among hydro‐climate, hydropower, and water's energy use are critical for evaluating Western US (WUS) water‐energy climate risksUnder climate change, our WUS water model finds declining streamflows, growing agricultural demands, and increased groundwater useWith warming and drying, water‐related energy use grows while hydropower generation decreases under most climate scenarios by mid‐century [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wind-generated electricity is a growing renewable energy resource. Because wind results from the uneven heating (and resulting pressure gradients) of the Earth, future wind resources may be affected by anticipated climate change. Many studies have used global and regional climate models to predict trends in the future wind resource over the continental United States. While some of these studies identified regions that are expected to gain wind energy, their results often come with a high degree of uncertainty, and lack of agreement across different climate models. In this paper we focus on wind energy density as a measure of the available wind resource over the continental United States. We estimate the change in wind energy density from the period 1968–2000 to the period 2038–2070 by using output from four regional climate models from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP). We find strong agreement across all 4 models that the wind energy resource is expected to increase in parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas – a region already in possession of both large scale generating capacity and political support for wind energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) have the potential to be an economic means of reducing direct (or tailpipe) carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the transportation sector. However, without a climate policy that places a limit on CO2 emissions from the electric generation sector, the net impact of widespread deployment of PHEVs on overall US CO2 emissions is not as clear. A comprehensive analysis must consider jointly the transportation and electricity sectors, along with feedbacks to the rest of the energy system. In this paper, we use the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory MiniCAM model to perform an integrated economic analysis of the penetration of PHEVs and the resulting impact on total US CO2 emissions. Under the assumptions used in this analysis where PHEVs obtain 50–60% of the market for passenger and light-duty trucks, the ability to deploy PHEVs under the two climate policies modeled here results in 6000–7300 Mt CO2 of additional cost -effective emissions reductions from the US economy over the period 2005–2050. The additional demand for geologic CO2 storage created by the introduction of the PHEVs is approximately equal to the cumulative geologic CO2 storage demanded by two to three large 1000 MW IGCC+CCS power plants over a 50 -year period. The introduction of PHEVs into the US transportation sector, coupled with climate policies such as those examined here, can also reduce US demand for oil by 20–30% by 2050 compared to today’s levels. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) was created in 1972 as a nonprofit research organization, funded primarily by the US electric power industry. Managing a broad public-private collaborative research program, EPRI was to prepare the industry for change by addressing major issues related to electric power production. Among other things, EPRI initiated an ambitious environmental research program in relation to acid rain and, later, climate change. Partly in consequence of the lessons learned in acid rain research, EPRI’s Environment Division around 1990 developed grand plans to show industry leadership on how to address climate change. However, as this article shows, EPRI gradually realized that natural science research alone was not an adequate response to environmental and social changes. Two vocabularies for change resulted: one in which change would be addressed by means of assessments in which future developments in the nature-society-technology system could be delineated, predicted, and ameliorated, and one in which change was essentially unpredictable and potentially dangerous. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the importance of renewable Distributed Generation (DG), electricity generation resources, and energy efficiency in reference to environmental justice communities in the U.S. It provides information on the federal programs including Low-income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and Weatherization Assistance Programs (WAP) that aid low-income communities by providing funds. It highlights that the use of renewable DG impacts climate change by reducing greenhouse gases.

The article presents information on electricity generation and the coal-burning power plant of the U.S. The increase in the electricity demand, the environmental opposition and allegations related to mining operations and the impact on water quality and climatic changes is discussed. The need of greenhouse gas mitigation, assisting policymakers for framing scientific and traditional legal principles and the use of policies and regulations for facilitating continuous use of coal is discussed.

Innovations in energy supply have traditionally been valued because they make more energy available than would otherwise be the case and/or make it available at lower cost. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) can also be viewed in this way to some extent, for example, as a means to keep coal as an electricity generation fuel in Europe and the USA. But the underlying driver for CCS is really that less fossil carbon is being emitted to the atmosphere. Since long-term cumulative emissions are the determining factor for climate change, long-term retention of stored CO2 is important. Long-term “leakage” risks also apply, however, to fossil fuels that are displaced in the short term by nonfossil energy sources (i.e., nuclear, renewables) since the fossil fuels may subsequently be used and the CO2 released to the atmosphere. If CCS is to achieve effective reductions in CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, however, it is important that projects are either near carbon-neutral, able to capture around 90% or more of the fossil carbon in the fuel used, or carbon-negative, capturing CO2 from biomass or directly from the air. Another class of CCS project, which involves capturing CO2 from hydrocarbon production (e.g., natural gas purification or oil sands processing) is still carbon-positive since the CO2 from the product fuel is likely to be released to the atmosphere. This class of CCS project should therefore be viewed as a “license to operate” for projects producing fossil fuels but not as an example of the approach that is needed to achieve the large cuts in greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., 80% or more in developed countries by 2050) now being suggested. Near carbon-neutral and carbon-negative CCS projects will have to produce carbon free energy vectors such as electricity, hydrogen, or heat. These in turn can be used to displace direct fossil use by the transport and building sectors. To make CCS available as a reasonably well-proven option by around 2020, a first tranche of demonstration plants need to be deployed as quickly as possible. A second, larger tranche of reference plants then needs to continue the learning process and demonstrate the technology at scale and ready for multiple repeat orders. After this second tranche, CCS should be ready to contribute to a rapid decarbonization of the electricity supply from coal, natural gas, and biomass power plants in developed countries in the decade 2020–2030. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article provides a synthesis of the most significant transitions taking place in the energy systems of the USA in 2018. These include the leveling off of the total consumption of primary energy and electricity, a shift away from coal-fired electricity generation, advances in the efficiency energy conversions and end-uses, as well as the onshoring and offshoring of some energy applications. Transitions are considered with a long-term, sociotechnological perspective using data from the past 60 years, recognizing the impacts technological developments, economics, public policy, cultural preferences, and concerns about environmental impacts such as climate change. Different transitions are in different phases of development with different scales of impact, with some likely to only become significant over the next few decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]