In December 2015, much of the world celebrated when 195 nations plus the European Union reached an agreement to address climate change and pledged to meet nationally determined emissions-reduction targets at the United Nations climate talks in Paris. But many experts have observed that the national targets in the Paris Agreement aren’t sufficiently aggressive to meet the goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius. Moreover, they worry that some countries won’t be willing — or able — to meet their targets.
Now, an MIT analysis shows that if countries meet their emissions-reduction pledges to the Paris climate agreement, the cost of electricity from solar photovoltaic systems could drop by 50 percent and from wind systems by 25 percent between now and 2030. The reason: To cut their emissions, countries will need to deploy low-carbon technologies, and with that deployment will come technological innovation and lower costs, enabling further deployment.
The researchers estimate that if countries reinvest their savings as costs decline, they can increase their solar deployment by 40 percent and wind deployment by 20 percent — for the same level of investment. The lower costs of these and other low-carbon technologies will also help developing countries meet their emissions-reduction commitments for the future. Results of the MIT analysis were presented at the White House and referenced by negotiators in Paris.
In the study, Jessika Trancik, the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Assistant Professor of Energy Studies at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and her colleagues showed that the impact of this mutually reinforcing cycle of emissions reduction and technology development can be significant. “The return on emissions reductions can be astonishingly large … and should feature prominently in efforts to broker an ambitious, long-term agreement among nations,” she notes.
Trancik agrees that the targets as written are too weak to do the job. But she cautions that looking only at those targets doesn’t tell the whole story. “There’s something else going on below the surface that’s important to recognize,” she says. “If those pledges are realized, they’ll require an expansion of clean energy, which will mean further investment in developing key clean-energy technologies. If good investment and policy decisions are made, the technologies will improve, and costs will come down.” Thus, the act of cutting carbon emissions will drive down the cost of meeting current emissions-reduction targets and of adopting stronger targets for the future.
The study involved an interdisciplinary team of graduate students — Patrick Brown of the Department of Physics, Joel Jean of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Ccience, and Goksin Kavlak and Magdalena Klemun of IDSS — in consultation with other colleagues at both MIT and Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
Before the Paris climate talks, the researchers brought their message to Washington. In an invited talk at the White House, Trancik presented the research findings to U.S. policymakers, and the message apparently resonated: U.S. negotiators used the report during the talks to encourage agreement to revisit and strengthen commitments every five years; White House statements on the agreement, including the final press release, cited the mutually reinforcing cycle between enhanced mitigation and cost reductions; and the Paris Agreement cited the benefits of investing in emissions reductions early on to drive down the cost of future mitigation.
This article originally appeared in MIT’s Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy initiative. The full text can be found here.