QUICK NEWS, June 4: How To Use The Social Cost Of Carbon To Stop The Crisis; The Boom In Battery Storage

How To Use The Social Cost Of Carbon To Stop The Crisis The Number With The Power To Halt The Climate Crisis; Wonky as it sounds, the social cost of carbon holds the key to crafting policies that avoid harm from greenhouse gas emissions.

Phil Davies, May 31, 2019 (Ensia)

“…[The social cost of carbon (SCC) is] a wonky number that captures the economic burden to society at a given point in the future of a metric ton of carbon dioxide released today. Because the SCC represents the economic benefit we’ll reap tomorrow by cutting CO2 emissions today, it gives us a way to put a dollar value on efforts to reduce future emissions and forestall climate change…[A number of countries, mainly in North America, have adopted the SCC as a tool for incorporating the impact of carbon into policies intended to prevent harm from climate change. Getting the SCC right — or at least agreeing on a range of values supported by the best available science — is vital to efforts to mitigate the climate crisis through regulation and market-based solutions such as carbon taxes…

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Calculating the SCC involves projecting increases in CO2 emissions due to population and economic growth, modeling the climate’s response to those emissions, and translating climatic change into expected economic damages (and benefits, in some instances) across multiple economic sectors. Because people typically value a dollar today more than a dollar tomorrow, a discount rate — typically between 2.5% and 7% annually — is applied to future damages. Discounting significantly reduces the impact, in current dollars, of damages that occur decades from now, and thus the benefits of preventing them. For example, at an annual discount rate of 3 percent, US$100 of climate damages in 2100 is worth about US$7 today…

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Many governments have set the SCC at about US$50 per metric ton of CO2 — the “central” estimate of a federal interagency working group in 2016. This figure is for emissions in 2020…But cost estimates of harm from CO2 emissions [from things like more frequent wildfires and large-scale migration] range from as little as US$1 per metric ton (a number proposed by the Trump administration) to over US$400 per metric ton — the number that emerged from a 2018 study by a team of U.S. and European researchers…Economists and climate researchers are [tapping the power of big data] to get a better handle on the SCC and make it less mysterious to regulatory analysts and policymakers…After all the revising and tweaking, the SCC is likely to remain an imperfect measure…But researchers hope to reduce that uncertainty and boost confidence in the SCC as the basis for policy aimed at avoiding the worst consequences…” click here for more

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The Boom In Battery Storage U.S. energy storage market breaks record for megawatts deployed in a single quarter, growing 232% year-over-year

June 4, 2019 (Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and the Energy Storage Association)

“The United States non-residential storage market had its strongest quarter ever in Q1 2019…[and it] was also the second strongest quarter on record for the U.S. residential storage segment…Overall, Q1 2019 was the largest ever single quarter for U.S. energy storage deployments in megawatt terms, an increase of 232 percent year-over-year. The quarter was the second largest ever in megawatt-hour terms. The U.S. saw 148.8 megawatts of energy storage deployed in Q1 2019, breaking the previous megawatt record set in Q4 2018 by six percent…California once again led the U.S. storage market in Q1 2019, while Arizona, New Jersey and New York also posted strong growth.

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State level regulatory activity, such as the Value of Distributed Energy Resources (VDER) proceeding in New York state and the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) Program in Massachusetts, continue to spur pipeline buildout in these states and position them for substantial growth in the next few years…Wood Mackenzie expects U.S. energy storage deployments in 2019 will be double those seen in 2018. Multiple [utility-scale] projects will come online in 2020, leading to a tripling of the market from 2019 to 2020…” click here for more

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