Net-Zero Greenhouse Gas Webcast

In the last years, many stakeholders, including cities and states, utilities and large corporations have set or proposed “Net-Zero” greenhouse gas emission targets as a transition to a clean energy system. Now there are national targets under consideration.

While long-run goals are framed in terms of reducing economy-wide emissions, the most immediate focus has been on decarbonizing the electric and transportation sectors. For both sectors there are near-term technologies that can cost-effectively reduce emissions. However, to achieve mid-century goals, new clean energy technologies are needed at large scale deployment across most, if not all, sectors of the economy.

Building on over two decades of decarbonization and clean energy analysis, EPRI has launched a webcast to highlight current climate & energy economic research as well as policy developments related to Net-Zero GHG Targets.

Webcast: Powering Decarbonization: Strategies for Net-Zero Emissions

On March 4th, EPRI kicked off a webcast with a workshop and discussion about scenarios for achieving net zero emissions targets in the U.S. electric sector in the context of deep economy-wide decarbonization. The webcast featured a presentation from Geoff Blanford, Senior Technical Executive, about a recently released publicly available white paper, Powering Decarbonization: Strategies for Net-Zero Emissions. This presentation outlined the implications of how a “Net-Zero” target is defined, including comparison to other proposed emissions reduction targets, the timing of the target, and the economic impacts, e.g. electricity price and energy service costs, of these types of targets. Following the presentation, a panel of expert speakers featuring:

• Jeff Burleson, SVP, System Planning, Southern Company
• Karen Palmer, Senior Fellow and Director, Resources for the Future
• Karl Hausker, Senior Fellow, World Resources Institute.

provided their individual insights and perspectives on policy options and potential pathways to achieving net-zero emissions. Broad engagement drove discussion surrounding the social cost of carbon, economic drivers of technology development and deployment projections, policy mechanisms, and carbon pricing, among others. Please join us for the next webcast, Electric Sector Reliability and Resource Adequacy in a Net-Zero System.

Name	Author	Size
Welcome and Introduction	Daniel Brooks, EPRI	745 KB
Powering Decarbonization: Strategies for Net-Zero CO2 Emissions	Geoff Blanford, EPRI	1.4 MB
Webcast Recording	All