Open Research for Plan­ning Elec­tric­ity Decar­boniza­tion: Appli­ca­tion to Methane Leakage

First I will describe my efforts to accel­er­ate the pace and qual­ity of elec­tric­ity decar­boniza­tion research by improv­ing an open-source grid plan­ning model (SWITCH) and mak­ing it usable to other researchers. The lack of shared datasets and mod­el­ing tools has hin­dered energy plan­ning, forc­ing researchers to com­pile datasets and write mod­els from scratch. I will describe my efforts to make the SWITCH grid-planning model more acces­si­ble to inter­dis­ci­pli­nary researchers who have lim­ited back­grounds in com­pu­ta­tional mod­el­ing, pro­gram­ming, or data management.

In the sec­ond sec­tion of my talk, I will present an appli­ca­tion of the SWITCH model to assess the impacts of methane leak­age on a carbon-constrained power grid. Nat­ural gas (NG) is often described as a bridge fuel for decar­boniz­ing the elec­tric­ity sec­tor because its low car­bon inten­sity rel­a­tive to coal, low costs due to hydraulic frac­tur­ing, and the fast-ramping capa­bil­i­ties of gas-fired gen­er­a­tion. Sev­eral pub­li­ca­tions on methane emis­sions have ranked indi­vid­ual gen­er­a­tion tech­nolo­gies by over­all green­house gas emis­sions, but none have yet used a sys­tems approach to assess how methane emis­sions impact a larger gen­er­a­tion port­fo­lio with a detailed rep­re­sen­ta­tion of renew­ables. My results indi­cate that emis­sion rates sig­nif­i­cantly impact the use of NG as a direct sub­sti­tute for coal, but have a much smaller impact on the deploy­ment and use of com­bus­tion tur­bines for reserves and peak­ing capac­ity. Increased methane emis­sions can increase or decrease the use of NG to com­ple­ment renew­ables, depend­ing on the emis­sions cap context.

Speaker: Josiah Johnston, UC Berkeley