Huff and 8 co-authors released a report dated May 6, 2021 On August 27, 2020, Exelon Generation announced planned premature closures of two Illinois nuclear plants (4 reactor units), which compete economically with fossil fueled plants within the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland (PJM) interconnection . This report quantitatively explores how these closures would undermine economic and decarbonization goals in the state of Illinois, such as an aggressive target to achieve a zero carbon electric grid by 2030.
Previous energy systems research has shown that such clean energy goals cannot be reached if nuclear plants prematurely retire [2, 3, 4]. In
particular, the February 2021 National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus report, “Accelerating Decarbonization of the U.S.
Energy System,” determined unequivocally that U.S. decarbonization will require keeping existing nuclear plants open [2]. Consistent with that literature, our simulations indicate that decarbonization in Illinois will require not only maintenance but expansion of nuclear energy capacity. The simulations in this report minimize future Illinois electric system cost in the context of potential policy constraints and demonstrate that:
• nuclear energy is necessary to reach Illinois’ carbon reduction goals;
• without existing nuclear power, reaching zero carbon would require solar deployments to displace 10, 000km2 of critical Illinois farmland;
• and deploying new advanced nuclear generation is the least expensive way to allow Illinois farmland to remain farmland while reaching zero-carbon by 2030.
These simulations also revealed many specific, complementary conclusions, such as:
• Keeping Illinois’ existing nuclear plants open through 2050 avoids 25 million metric tons of life-cycle CO2 emissions and 600,000 metric tons of e-waste.
• Even if advanced nuclear deployments experienced 200% capital cost overruns, total system cost impacts would be negligible.
• Deploying advanced nuclear avoids approximately 900,000 metric tons of e-waste.
• Extraordinary, possibly infeasible, grid-scale battery storage capacity is required to meet any zero-carbon target with significant renewable penetration.
Eleven (11) emissions-free nuclear reactors at six (6) sites produce the majority of electricity in Illinois and critically underpin its clean energy future.
Four (4) of these reactors, representing over 4GWe of electric capacity, are at the Byron and Dresden plants, which face premature closure. This report
quantitatively demonstrates the role nuclear energy must play in minimizing cost while meeting Illinois’ carbon goals through 2050, with a particular
focus on those plants.
We have modeled the Illinois electric grid and conducted optimization simulations of key policy scenarios. These simulations establish the least
costly energy generation mixtures with and without the at-risk plants in the context of various policy factors, such as zero-emissions targets. With these
solutions, we compared the economic and carbon implications of these energy futures. In addition to emissions, this report also considers other environmental impacts of available energy choices, such as land use and solid waste generation. Other recent work has reviewed the potential health impacts of these closures.
We built a computational model of Illinois’ electric system that leverages high fidelity data from a variety of sources to explore various potential policy scenarios in the 2020-2050 time frame. Comparison among optimal solutions quantified the economic and emissions impacts of decisions such as: prematurely closing nuclear plants, capping emissions, aggressively installing renewable generation, or deploying advanced nuclear reactors. The following sections describe the methods, data, and assumptions used in the modeled scenarios (Section 3), the resulting optimal solutions (Section 4), and a discussion of the key findings (Section 5). Details of the models and calculations are further described in Appendix A.
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
