Modernizing Pennsylvania’s Clean Energy Policies
On behalf of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Department of Energy Grid Deployment Office and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Synapse evaluated the impacts of the proposed Pennsylvania Climate Emissions Reduction Program (PACER) and the Pennsylvania Reliable Energy Sustainability Standard (PRESS) on electricity bills, emissions, in-state investment, and grid reliability.
PACER would create a Pennsylvania-specific cap-and-invest program: the state would set a cap on carbon dioxide (CO2), fossil generators over 25 MW would buy allowances to emit, and a majority of the revenue from the sale of allowances would be used to reduce customer electricity bills. PRESS would modernize Pennsylvania’s existing portfolio standard, the Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards (AEPS). PRESS increases the required percentage of electricity sales from in-state generators and modifies the eligibility of which resources are able to participate in the program.
Synapse ran a capacity expansion and production cost model for all of PJM using EnCompass, and then evaluated PACER and PRESS impacts compared to a base case without the policies. We found that PACER and PRESS would reduce residential customer bills compared to the base case. We also calculated that these policies would reduce Pennsylvania’s CO2 emissions by 38 percent over 2025-2040 compared to the base case. In addition to these emissions reductions, the policies would attract an additional $8 billion in capital investment plus $3.4 billion in federal clean energy tax credits to Pennsylvania. The policies do not create grid reliability issues compared to the base case. Finally, our modeling illustrated that addressing regional interconnection queue constraints would unlock even more benefits from the policies by allowing Pennsylvania and other states to more quickly build generating resources.
You can find the full report below.