Growing use of renewable energy in the US brings billions of dollars in benefits | Renewable energy

A new report shows that by increasing the use of renewable energy, the United States has not only reduced greenhouse gas emissions, but also improved air quality, with benefits worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The study, published Wednesday in Cell Reports Sustainability and based on publicly available data, focuses on the growth of renewable energy in the U.S. from 2019 to 2022.

“From 2019 to 2022, wind and solar energy production increased by approximately 55%,” said Dev Millenstein, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “By 2022, wind and solar energy will provide approximately 14% of total U.S. electricity demand.”

The authors found that during this period, by reducing the use of fossil fuel power plants, the country’s use of wind and solar power reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 900 million metric tons. That’s the equivalent of taking 71 million cars off the road every year.

These major climate benefits may obscure the air quality benefits of renewable energy, wrote the authors from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and renewable energy consulting firm Clean Kilowatts. To shed light on these additional benefits, scientists quantified how much the use of wind and solar reduces toxic air emissions, focusing specifically on sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen dioxide (NOx), which are produced when burning fossil fuels.

They found that SO2 and NOx emissions – both linked to an increased risk of asthma and various other health problems – fell by a total of 1 million tonnes over these three years.

To determine the public health impact of this reduction, the authors “used air quality models to track the population exposed to pollution from the power plant,” Millstein said. They also conducted epidemiological studies to examine the effects of these emissions and quantified the benefits using an Environmental Protection Agency dollar value, establishing a population-wide value for reducing the risk of premature death, he said.

Overall, the authors found that reducing SO2 and NOx emissions provided $249 billion in climate and health benefits to the United States – a figure that Millstein deemed “notable.”

It then examined the benefits that wind and solar energy offer to specific regions of the United States. For example, wind energy is particularly beneficial to all central states due to the displacement of emissions in local energy grids; the same goes for solar in the Carolinas. This is an aspect of the research that was praised by Jeremiah Johnson, a professor of climate and energy at North Carolina State University, who did not work on the study.

“These findings could help us direct future development of wind and solar energy to provide the greatest climate and health benefits,” said Johnson, whose work was cited in the study.

He expressed hope that the publication would help society focus on the benefits that wind and solar energy already bring.

He said society “often focuses on the challenges we face” when it comes to ecological damage. “But it’s also important to recognize when something works.”