Coal-Biomass Co-firing within Renewable Portfolio Standards: Strategic Adoption by Heterogeneous Firms and Emissions Implications

Brayam Valqui, Mort D. Webster, Shanxia Sun, and Thomas W. Hertel

The Energy Journal, 2023, vol. Volume 44, issue Number 5

Abstract: As electricity from coal declines, co-firing coal plants with biomass has been proposed to extend coal unit life, increase production, and reduce carbon emissions. Previous studies reach conflicting conclusions on whether coal biomass co-firing would result in a net increase or decrease in carbon emissions. We explore whether biomass co-firing would decrease emissions using a novel framework that includes two critical features of electricity markets: strategic adoption decisions by firms and intertemporal constraints on power plant operations. We apply this framework to a case study based on the Midwestern U.S. electricity market and show that profit maximizing firms will retrofit mid-efficiency coal units, rather than the most or least efficient units. We demonstrate that, contrary to expectations, this strategy leads to a net increase in system-wide carbon emissions under high carbon prices because of the other generators displaced by co-firing units.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=4055 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aen:journl:ej44-5-webster

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().