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By Akshaya Jha, Carnegie Mellon University 

The U.S. is nearing the end of one of its hottest summers on record. Across the nation, heat waves have driven peak electricity demand on some days to levels far exceeding seasonal averages.

Grid operators rely on so-called “peaker” plants to ensure they will have enough supply to meet these demand surges. Peaker units can start up quickly and at relatively low cost, but they typically burn more fuel per unit of electricity produced than other types of fossil fuel units.

Because they are less efficient than other plants, peakers typically run only during high-demand periods. Historically, peakers have run for less than 10% of the year, often for just a few hours at a stretch.

Nonetheless, their higher emissions per unit of electricity produced raise environmental and health concerns. As of 2021, there were 999 peaker plants across the U.S., in all 50 states. About 70% of these plants burned natural gas, and the rest were powered by oil and coal.

To reduce air pollution and combat climate change, the U.S. is shifting away from fossil fuels and increasing its use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power. Ironically, though, as climate change generates more frequent and intense heat waves, many electricity systems are increasingly relying on peaker plants to balance fluctuations in renewable power generation. Proposals to build new peakers or extend the lives of old ones have stirred controversy in states including Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Texas and New York.

My research focuses on the economic and environmental costs and benefits of producing electricity. Here’s how the clean energy transition is changing the role of peaker plants and some other options for keeping the lights on during peak demand periods.

Balancing the power supply

For system operators, one key characteristic of a power plant is whether it can produce power on demand. Many renewable resources, including wind, solar and certain types of hydropower, are known as nondispatchable resources because they are governed by nature, producing energy when conditions allow. The cost of generating electricity with them is low, so they are typically used to their maximum capacity.

Power plants that run on fossil fuels or nuclear power are known as dispatchable resources because they can produce power whenever it’s needed. They have higher operating costs than renewables, however, mainly because gas, coal, nuclear and oil plants must buy fuel in order to operate.

Some of these plants – historically, those that run on coal or nuclear fuel – are called baseload plants. They generate power relatively cheaply but take time to start up and ramp up to full power. Intermediate units produce power at a higher cost for each additional megawatt-hour produced, but they can cycle up and down more quickly than baseload plants. Peakers have the highest costs per megawatt-hour, but they can adjust their output very quickly.

Historically, baseload units operated year-round, with intermediate units adjusting output to meet short-term demand fluctuations. Peaker plants were used only during rare peak demand periods.

But as power suppliers add more wind and solar energy to the grid, they are using dispatchable fossil fuel units more frequently to balance changes in renewable generation – for example, to run air conditioners when the sun goes down but temperatures are still high. This favors units that can quickly change production levels, even if they are less fuel-efficient. The result is a growing role for peaker plants.

Kearny Generating Station, a former coal-fired baseload power plant, now a gas-fired peaker, on the Hackensack River in New Jersey.
Jim Henderson/Wikipedia, CC BY

Environmental justice flash points

Electricity production from fossil fuels in the U.S. has decreased with large-scale investment in wind and solar generation. But fossil fuel-burning power plants still produce about 60% of U.S. electricity – and those plants emit pollutants that contribute to climate change and degrade local air quality.

Exposure to sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter and ozone is linked to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses and premature death. While overall air pollution has decreased in the U.S. in recent decades, low-income and minority neighborhoods still suffer disproportionately from poor air quality.

One 2022 report estimates that 32 million Americans live within 3 miles of a peaker plant. In 2024, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that historically disadvantaged racial or ethnic communities were statistically more likely to be located closer than average to peakers.

Other ways to meet peak demand

How else can electricity supply and demand be balanced? One option is using batteries to store electricity when wind or solar output is high, then discharging it when demand exceeds supply from conventional resources.

Although battery investment costs currently are high, they are projected to decrease significantly in the coming decades. In 2023, the U.S. had a total of about 15 gigawatts of battery storage capacity – equivalent to 15 large nuclear power plants – and that figure could double in 2024.

Another alternative is expanding transmission systems, which make it possible to draw on electricity from lower-cost units in distant areas instead of relying on nearby peaker plants. Building new transmission lines, however, comes with significant regulatory, permitting and land use challenges.

A third option is demand response programs, in which electricity consumers pay higher prices during higher demand periods. This could help reduce peaks and valleys in demand across the day, benefiting more efficient but less flexible baseload units designed to run around the clock.

Most consumers, however, don’t currently pay prices that reflect short-term changes in wholesale electricity costs. Moreover, it’s uncertain whether residential customers would alter their consumption based on short-horizon price fluctuations. Technologies such as smart thermostats and energy management apps could help by taking the burden off consumers to manually adjust their electricity use in response to price fluctuations.

Finally, power plant owners can invest in technologies to reduce emissions from fossil fuel units. Peakers typically lack pollution control technologies because they aren’t used very often. Retrofitting older plants to make them more efficient could also help, since they would produce fewer emissions for each unit of electricity.

These investments are costly, so policymakers have to weigh the health benefits of reduced air pollution against the investment costs for power plant owners.

Increasing investment in wind and solar energy is reducing local air pollution from electricity production. But it’s also shifting production away from thermally efficient baseload units that can’t respond quickly to shifts in demand or renewables output. I believe it is increasingly important to explore policies that create incentives for investing in alternatives such as battery storage and transmission infrastructure, as well as in power plant upgrades to reduce pollution exposure.

About the Author:

Akshaya Jha, Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Parag Jyoti Saikia, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 

“Hey Rupam, open the door. Take this fish,” a woman yelled from outside. I was sitting in the kitchen at my friend Rupam’s house in rural northeast India. It was the heart of monsoon season, and rain had been falling since morning. The woman must have been shouting because the noise of the rain on the tin roof muted everything else.

The aunty who lived next door stood outside with a large bowl of Boriala fish. Her husband had gone fishing on the Subansiri River, which flows next to the village, and he had fished all evening. “My husband cannot stay indoors in this weather,” she said in Assamese, the local language. “You can catch a lot of fish during this time.”

The monsoon season has long brought a bounty of fish from May to September for people living downstream.

The Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project, under construction, will be one of India’s largest hydropower dams.
Nayan J. Nath, CC BY

However, this is likely to change once the Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project, one of the largest hydropower dams in India, is completed upstream. Expected to be fully operational in 2026, the dam will change the natural flow of the river.

For most of the day, the dam will hold back water, letting only a small amount through, roughly equivalent to the region’s dry season. But for about four hours each night, it will release water to generate power, sending a raging river downstream almost like during monsoon season.

The dam will not only block the movement of fish, but also change the way people living downstream experience the river’s flows.

In a 2010 report on the likely impact of the Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project on downstream populations, experts from three premier institutes of Assam — the central state of northeast India — identified several concerns for downstream communities, including flood and erosion risk, earthquake risk, the loss of water flow for fishing and groundwater recharge, and the survival of species including river dolphins.

Now, a decade later, as the dam is nearing completion, the central question remains: What will happen to people like Rupam’s neighbor, whose lives and livelihoods depend on the river?

In 2023, I lived in a village next to the Subansiri River. My dissertation research brought me there to study how this hydroelectric dam, under construction since 2005, is affecting communities downstream.

‘Small displacement’ by ‘benign’ dams

Northeast India has been the focus of hydropower dam construction since the beginning of this century. In order to secure the country’s energy future, Central Electricity Authority of India in 2001 identified the Brahmaputra River basin as having the highest hydropower potential – 63,328 megawatts. It proposed constructing a whopping 168 hydropower dams in the region.

This earned the region the nickname “India’s Future Powerhouse.” The Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project was the first project.

The government sees the mega-hydro dam initiative as a win-win. It expects the dams to increase India’s energy security while also developing large infrastructure networks in one of India’s contentious borderland regions.

About 80% of the power for “India’s Future Powerhouse” is proposed to be generated in Arunachal Pradesh, the largest state of northeast India. China has repeatedly challenged India’s sovereignty over Arunachal since the latter’s independence in 1947.

Building dams in Arunachal Pradesh has another advantage: very low population density. It has about 17 people per square kilometer, and over 80% of Arunachal’s total territory is forest. That helped the government of India to argue that “there is relatively ‘small displacement’ by submergence as compared to that in other parts of the country and therefore these projects are benign.”

However, these projects are in no way benign to the people who live downstream.

The disruption to lives downstream

The flood plains of the Subansiri are home to people belonging to indigenous communities and lower castes of Hindu caste hierarchy. Mising – the largest indigenous community in the downstream region – call the river “Awanori,” which means “mother river.”

As part of my long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I observed how a range of livelihoods in the downstream region – fishing, agriculture, livestock grazing, recovering driftwood and transporting people by boat in remote areas – are all dependent on the 79-mile Subansiri River. I interviewed people who live there and attended community events to understand how the river plays a big role in everyday life.

Their reliance on the river has been based on natural, uncontrolled flows. Once the dam is completed, the river flows will be controlled by the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation.

Once in operation, the dam will block most of the river’s flow for 20 hours of the day, and then release that water – about 2,560 cubic meters per second – to power turbines that can meet peak electricity demand between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. every night. During the 20 nonpeak hours, the dam would release less than a tenth as much water.

What happens when the river flow changes?

When the dam was first proposed, there was no plan to release water during the nonpeak 20 hours. Activists argued that cutting the water’s flow would have made it impossible for any aquatic animal to survive downstream.

In 2017, the nonpeak-hour flow proposal was increased to a range of 225 to 250 cubic meters per second. That year, the National Green Tribunal, which resolves civil cases related to the environment, asked the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation to ensure a minimum level of water for the survival of Gangetic dolphin, India’s national aquatic animal. This judgment helped pave the way for restarting the construction after an eight-year delay. However, the tribunal did not address how people living downstream would be affected by the changes.

The calculation of minimum flow only for the survival of one aquatic mammal leaves out numerous ways the flows of the Subansiri matter to people and other animals.

The dam itself threatens the downstream existence of many fish varieties, including the golden mahseer. It will also alter the flow and sediment supply in the river, and the abrupt and powerful flow for four hours each night will have greater scouring capacity and risks eroding the riverbed and banks.

Traditionally, from October to April, the dry riverbed and sandbar islands have been used to grow early-maturing ahu rice and mustard before the monsoon flood waters arrive. People also graze their livestock in the islands and in the fields after crops are harvested.

Once the dam begins flooding the river for four hours a night, however, the riverbed and sand-bar islands will be largely unusable.

The rainy season when the river floods is the most productive time for fishing and collecting driftwood. However the dam will obstruct the movement of fish and trap wood behind the dam. So, even though there will be flood waters every day in the river, fishermen and wood collectors may not benefit from it.

For people like Rupam’s neighbor, the Subansiri River they know will change. They will have to navigate the river more cautiously, and every evening there will be monsoon-season water levels.

Will they be able to catch enough fish to share with their neighbors? Only time will tell.

About the Author:

Parag Jyoti Saikia, Ph.D. Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Eoin McLaughlin, University College Cork; Cristián Ducoing, Lund University, and Nicholas Hanley, University of Glasgow 

Many commentators believe that the world should move away from measuring economic success in terms of GDP growth. Yes, growth has brought prosperity and untold riches, but it has had significant negative side effects for the planet, including climate change, pollution and species extinction. None of these are captured in GDP data.

A whole “beyond GDP” movement has emerged over the last several decades, arguing that we should adopt a new way of measuring the wealth of nations. There is an ongoing debate about the best alternative, and many indicators have supporters, such as gross national happiness and the genuine progress indicator.

Yet one stands out as having by far the most buy-in from major international institutions. Known as “inclusive wealth”, it expands what we mean by wealth to include things like the natural environment and the abilities of the population. But it comes with a major problem. There’s no agreement around how it should be measured, so different institutions publish very different figures. In our view, this is a major obstacle to its mass adoption.

Inclusive wealth

Inclusive wealth ascribes a value to the assets a nation has produced that generate well-being, and measures how they are changing over time. These assets are:

• Human capital: the knowledge and skills of the population.
• Produced capital: goods and services produced by human endeavour.
• Natural capital: the sum of all nature-based assets from which humans derive well-being, both now and in the future.
• Social capital: the social networks that exist within a society.

There is strong theoretical support for the idea that this approach is a good way of measuring the sustainability of economic development. The key point is that when inclusive wealth per capita is going up, the future wellbeing of the population will go up, which is a necessary condition for sustainable development.

Foundational texts in support of inclusive wealth include Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta’s 2001 book, Human Well-Being and the Environment, and his Harvard counterpart Martin Weitzman’s 2003 book, Income, Wealth and the Maximum Principle.

Dasgupta carried out a review for the UK government in 2021 into the economics of biodiversity, which similarly advocates for measuring national inclusive wealth instead of national income. There have also been recent calls by academics in this field to use inclusive wealth to help with the global biodiversity framework, a UN-led drive to be “living in harmony with nature” by 2050.

Inclusive wealth is measured by both the World Bank and UN Environment Programme (Unep). The World Bank has been measuring it since the late 1990s, and first published global estimates in a 2006 report called Where is the wealth of nations : measuring capital for the 21st century. It has since published three major updates to this report, including a major revision to the methodology, with another on the way. As for Unep, it began measuring inclusive wealth in 2012.

But there are still some kinks that need ironing out before this indicator can be of any practical use. In a new paper in Ecological Economics, we compare the approaches of the World Bank and Unep and find a big divergence in their calculations.

This may explain why inclusive wealth has yet to be adopted in any serious way by any major economies (all we’ve seen so far is some mentions in policy documents, like this one from New Zealand, and a recent decision by the Biden-Harris administration to start tracking the value of US natural resources at federal level using natural-capital accounting).

The discrepancies relate mainly to natural capital. Both Unep and the World Bank include similar if not identical data from the same components: non-renewables such as fossil fuels and minerals, and renewable elements such as fisheries and forest resources. The problem is that the institutions’ research teams value them differently.

The World Bank approach comes up with a present value for expected future earnings by discounting from what they will eventually be worth. In contrast, Unep uses fixed accounting prices, referred to as “shadow prices”, which are based on market prices today.

This leads to different conclusions about the trajectory of our natural capital, and thus, by implication, of the sustainability of current development paths. This is then exacerbated by another discrepancy around how the institutions measure changes in human capital.

Country differences

In our paper, we highlight the case of Qatar. According to Unep, it is one of the worst performers in terms of the change in inclusive wealth per capita, and so is judged unsustainable. Yet according to World Bank estimates, Qatar’s inclusive wealth per capita is growing positively.

Which is it? If development is unsustainable, some remedial action will be necessary, but if it is sustainable, no problem. How is the Qatari government to decide how to proceed?

We find similar conflicting signals for many other countries. According to the World Bank data, 20 countries’ inclusive wealth per capita is in decline (in other words, unsustainable), while the Unep data has 45 countries in decline. There is also little crossover in terms of these two lists.

As many as 34 of the countries that the World Bank says have growing inclusive wealth per capita are in decline according to Unep.

We agree strongly with the basic proposition that measuring inclusive wealth is key to ensuring the world develops sustainably. But there needs to be a more consistent approach for this signal to achieve enough credibility to be widely adopted. In our experience, the World Bank is much more transparent than Unep about the data in its calculations. Without full Unep transparency, it’s difficult to get to the root of the discrepancy.

Having said that, both broad approaches have merits, so it’s more a question of everyone committing to a single approach than arguing that one is better than the other. Unless this measurement problem can be resolved, it’s difficult to see countries taking inclusive wealth seriously. That could have serious consequences in the battle to make economic development sustainable.

About the Authors:

Eoin McLaughlin, Professor in Economics, University College Cork; Cristián Ducoing, Senior lecturer at Sustainability transformations over time and space, Lund University, and Nicholas Hanley, Chair in Environmental and One Health Economics, University of Glasgow

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.