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Health and climate benefits of offshore wind facilities in the Mid-Atlantic United States

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Health and climate benefits of offshore wind facilities in the Mid-Atlantic United States
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Electricity from fossil fuels contributes substantially to both climate change and the health burden of air pollution. Renewable energy sources are capable of displacing electricity from fossil fuels, but the quantity of health and climate benefits depend on site-specific attributes that are not often included in quantitative models. Here, we link an electrical grid simulation model to an air pollution health impact assessment model and US regulatory estimates of the impacts of carbon to estimate the health and climate benefits of offshore wind facilities of different sizes in two different locations. We find that offshore wind in the Mid-Atlantic is capable of producing health and climate benefits of between $54 and $120 per MWh of generation, with the largest simulated facility (3000 MW off the coast of New Jersey) producing approximately $690 million in benefits in 2017. The variability in benefits per unit generation is a function of differences in locations (Maryland versus New Jersey), simulated years (2012 versus 2017), and facility generation capacity, given complexities of the electrical grid and differences in which power plants are offset. This work demonstrates health and climate benefits of offshore wind, provides further evidence of the utility of geographically-refined modeling frameworks, and yields quantitative insights that would allow for inclusion of both climate and public health in benefits assessments of renewable energy.
ClimateVideoElectric power distributionComputer animation
PhotodissoziationClimate changePaperBuick CenturyWind farmCurrent densityComputer animation
Natural gasAtmosphere of EarthElectricityCoalEffects unitFossil fuelQuality (business)
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Wind farmModel buildingEmissionsvermögenClimate
ElectricityClimateAtmosphere of EarthModel buildingSizingPower (physics)Wind powerGreenhouse gasDiving suitMorningCartridge (firearms)HourCombined cycleFlight simulatorYearWind farmEmissionsvermögenTelevisionTable
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Atmosphere of EarthRenewable energyDensity wave theoryCartridge (firearms)Meeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
Hi, I'm Dr. Jonathan Bunicor. I'm a research associate at the Harvard T.H. Chan School Public Health Center for Health in the Global Environment. And I'm here to talk a little bit about our paper published recently in Environmental Research Letters called The Health and Climate Benefits of Offshore Wind Facilities in the Mid-Atlantic United States.
Climate change has been called one of the greatest public health threats of the 21st century, but it's also considered possibly one of the greatest public health opportunities of the 21st century. One of the things that I was really interested about in this research was trying to really put health
into the discussion about climate change. A lot of electricity in the U.S. is generated from fossil fuels, so these, largely in the U.S., it's coal and natural gas. And all of these things contribute to air pollution, air pollution deteriorate air quality, and it can lead to health effects ranging from respiratory disease to stroke to heart attacks
and ultimately death. So what we did is that we used a series of models to estimate both the climate and the health benefits of building offshore wind in areas off the coast of New Jersey and off the coast of Maryland. If we were to build offshore wind, what emissions would they be averting?
What would be the health benefits, and also what would be the climate benefits? So we did this using the Epstein model. And what that is is it's a suite of three different models tied together. There's first an electrical grid dispatch model, there's this public health benefits model, and then also a climate benefits model.
We first simulated a sort of baseline case of what the electrical grid would behave without any of these facilities in place. We then simulated how the electrical grid would behave if there were these additional facilities off the coast of New Jersey and Maryland. We simulated a variety of different facility sizes
in these two places. The smallest was a 200 megawatt facility off the coast of Maryland. The largest was a 3,000 megawatt facility in New Jersey. The facility in Maryland, the 200 megawatt facility, generates about enough power to provide electricity for about 59,000 average U.S. homes.
The largest facility, the 3,000 megawatt facility in New Jersey, it provides enough power to power about 900,000 U.S. homes, which by the way, it's about enough electricity to power most of Washington, D.C. When we put these benefits to both climate and health into monetary terms, we get benefits of about $54 to $120 per megawatt hour.
And the largest facility that we simulated generated benefits of about 690 million over the course of a year. So that is a combination of both the climate benefits from offsetting carbon emissions and also the health benefits due to it displacing air pollutant emissions. The health benefits from that facility
was about 55 lives saved a year. Over the course of, say, a 30-year life of a wind farm, that would be about 1,650 lives saved from that one facility. The day-to-day experience of electricity as we consume it isn't going to change. You can still watch TV, you can still make toast in the morning. But the difference is because you're getting
your electricity from these cleaner sources, the air quality is a little cleaner, you're a little healthier, and you're also emitting less carbon. And these benefits are occurring basically immediately, and they're occurring in the regions that are building these facilities. When we build renewable energy, in this case, offshore wind, we're improving air quality and improving health.