Status: Published
**Citation:**Baker, Erin; Bistline, John; Attiogbe, Nexus. 2025. Robust pathway analysis of electricity investments under net-zero uncertainties. Published in Energy and Climate Change 6 (2025): 100204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egycc.2025.100204.
This paper presents a robust pathway analysis framework designed to help policy-makers and utilities evaluate long-term electricity investment strategies under deep uncertainty and multiple decision criteria. The motivation is that decarbonizing the U.S. power sector by 2050 involves many possible technology pathways, each sensitive to uncertain future fuel prices, capital costs, and environmental impacts. Many modeling efforts evaluate pathways using a single criterion (typically cost or CO2), which may insufficiently account for uncertainty or co-pollutant emissions. The authors use Robust Portfolio Decision Analysis (RPDA) to operationalize belief dominance (robustness across uncertain parameter values) and combine that with Pareto dominance (robustness across multiple objectives) to identify electricity system pathways that perform well across a broad range of futures and criteria.
This study compares electricity capacity pathway results from nine distinct net-zero models included in the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) 37 study. Each pathway represents a different mix of technologies (renewables, storage, nuclear, and fossil fuels with and without carbon capture) designed to achieve economy-wide net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050. To evaluate these pathways on an equal footing, the authors use a common value function that estimates total system costs, cumulative power-sector CO2 emissions, and co-pollutant emissions (SO2 and NO?) for each pathway. They assess each pathway under 24 cost scenarios, combining three natural gas price trajectories with eight scenarios of variations in capital costs for renewables, nuclear, and CCS. By expanding the value function to include more than just cost optimization, the authors show that many more candidate pathways are non-dominated and thus arguably should be included in conversations about ways to meet net-zero goals by 2050.
Link to Journal Publication: Robust pathway analysis of electricity investments under net-zero uncertainties - ScienceDirect