Electric-Gas Infrastructure Planning for Deep Decarbonization of Energy Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a joint planning model for electricity and natural gas infrastructure that considers emerging technologies and policy interactions to support deep decarbonization of energy systems.

Contribution

It develops a comprehensive least-cost planning framework for coupled electricity and natural gas systems incorporating new technologies and operational constraints.

Findings

Power sector uses only 15-43% of the emissions budget under decarbonization scenarios.

Model evaluates infrastructure outcomes for the U.S. New England region.

Disproportionate reliance on non-power natural gas demand for emissions reduction.

Abstract

The transition to a deeply decarbonized energy system requires coordinated planning of infrastructure investments and operations serving multiple end-uses while considering technology and policy-enabled interactions across sectors. Electricity and natural gas (NG), which are vital vectors of today's energy system, are likely to be coupled in different ways in the future, resulting from increasing electrification, adoption of variable renewable energy (VRE) generation in the power sector and policy factors such as cross-sectoral emissions trading. This paper develops a least-cost investment and operations model for joint planning of electricity and NG infrastructures that considers a wide range of available and emerging technology options across the two vectors, including carbon capture and storage (CCS) equipped power generation, low-carbon drop-in fuels (LCDF) as well as long-duration energy storage (LDES). The model incorporates the main operational constraints of both systems and allows each system to operate under different temporal resolutions consistent with their typical scheduling timescales. We apply the modeling framework to evaluate power-NG system outcomes for the U.S. New England region under different technology, decarbonization goals, and demand scenarios. Under a global emissions constraint, ranging between 80-95\% emissions reduction compared to 1990 levels, the least-cost solution disproportionately relies on using the available emissions budget to serve non-power NG demand and results in the power sector using only 15-43\% of the emissions budget.