Social, Institutional and Behavioral Analysis

Not all Renewable Energy is Created Equal

Daniel Morton — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:20:53 +0000

Not all Renewable Energy is Created Equal Daniel Morton Fri, 07/31/2026 - 12:20

Daniel Morton

Solar panels in California and wind turbines in Indiana both produce clean, non-polluting electricity, but one of them consistently delivers greater benefits to the environment, according to new research from RASEI Fellow Dan Kaffine.

On paper, a megawatt-hour is just a megawatt-hour, it will charge your phone or run your dishwasher the same way, regardless of the source. However, the value to, or impact on, the environment is not fixed. It depends almost entirely on what power plant it replaces. A new wind turbine only helps the climate and local air quality to the extent that it pushes a more polluting plant offline. If instead it is just competing with another clean energy source, the environmental benefit effectively disappears.

Think of it like carpooling. Taking one car off the road does a lot more good during a gridlocked rush hour than it does taking it off an empty highway at 3 AM. Same action, but vastly different impact, depending entirely on what else is going on in the system. In many cases, renewable energy works the same way. A wind turbine spinning at 3 AM in Indiana is like carpooling during rush hour, it is likely pushing a coal plant offline, cutting real emissions. That same turbine spinning at 3 PM in California, when the grid is already flush with solar generated electricity, is more like carpooling on an empty road; the energy is clean, but it is not actually reducing emissions.

To get a more accurate picture of the environmental value of energy, and how it changes across time and location, required significant analysis. “You can have a technically identical megawatt-hour of energy from a wind farm or a solar plant” explains Kaffine “but the value to society of that megawatt-hour, from an environmental standpoint, can be very different.” Kaffine and Fell show that the magnitude of a renewable energy source’s environmental value hinges on which “marginal” power plant it displaces, and that this displacement can actually follow predictable patterns. The paper that appears in The Energy Journal, explores the different factors and implications at play in this determination. The team explored a range of different scenarios. The analysis included how location and energy transmission constraints impact which generators are offset, it looked at how the timing of renewable production plays a role and how policies such as renewable production subsidies and regulations around Green Hydrogen impact the energy value of new projects. Through this detailed analysis some headline findings emerged.

The time of day matters. Displace power at night and you are more likely to displace a coal plant. Displace it midday, and you are most likely competing with gas, or worse, another renewable source.

Location is key. Wind in the coal-heavy upper Midwest is likely offsetting coal near population centers, delivering real air-quality improvements. Wind or solar in California is more often competing with the state’s already abundant renewable sources.

Understanding that the value varies is essential for building policies that drive change in the grid. In California, wind turbines that turn in the middle of a sunny day often don’t displace fossil fuels at all, instead it forces solar generation to be curtailed. “You don’t want to be subsidizing a wind generator that is just bumping off solar in the middle of the day” explains Kaffine. Until we recognize that we need to take the environmental value into account, and install renewable generators in locations where they can displace the most polluting plants, then we are not maximizing the possible change.

Currently, most environmental policy treats renewable energy as fungible: a megawatt-hour is a megawatt-hour. Production tax credits pay a flat rate per MWh of wind or solar, with no consideration of when or where it is generated. Many renewable portfolio standards just require a fixed percentage of power to come from renewables, with little attention to their environmental value. Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), which are the tradable certificates that are woven into many of these programs are priced simply on energy output, and no concern about environmental value.

This kind of flat-rate logic assumes that all renewable energy generation delivers roughly equivalent environmental benefit. Kaffine and Fell’s work shows how this assumption breaks down when you look deeper into the details.

Two ideas emerge from this study as the researchers look forward. First, you can only manage what you can measure. Regulators need something close to real-time data on which power plant is getting displaced at any given moment. Historical estimates are not good enough. The infrastructure required for such measurements is starting to emerge. For example, grid operators in the upper Midwest have begun piloting dashboards that track local marginal emissions, using the same framework that electricity markets already employ to track local marginal prices.

Second, integrating this data into policy tools. Currently, subsidies don’t distinguish quality. A wind farm gets the same subsidy whether it is offsetting a 40-year old coal plant, or just curtailing a neighboring solar array. Think about how food labels distinguish an organic, farm-identified chicken breast from a generic one. This gives buyers, in the case of energy the regulators and utilities, a way to tell higher-impact renewable energy apart from lower-impact renewable energy, rather than treating every megawatt-hour as interchangeable.

“We know clean air is valuable to people. We know that the environment is valuable to people” says Kaffine, “But there’s no market for it, so we don’t have a price for it. How do you put a number on that?”. Kaffine sees the work as ultimately in service of a simple goal. “At RASEI, the end game is always a better environment” he says “All the technical research is in service of making a cleaner environment. It is really cool to be able to trace these advances all the way through to the end impact.”

JULY 2026

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BES: Life Cycle-Based Decision Making for Sustainable Materials and Energy Systems

Daniel Morton — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:39:28 +0000

BES: Life Cycle-Based Decision Making for Sustainable Materials and Energy Systems Daniel Morton Tue, 04/07/2026 - 13:39

Event Details

Tuesday April 7, 2026 | 10:00 - 11:00 AM

SEEC Building Sievers Room (S228)

Abstract:

In this seminar, Dr. Van Roijen will present how life cycle–based approaches can be used to translate complex system dynamics into actionable insights. She will highlight two case studies: (1) developing decarbonization pathways for the petrochemical sector using LCA, and (2) integrating LCA with supply chain and criticality assessments to evaluate trade-offs in renewable energy systems. The talk will emphasize both key findings and transferable methodologies that can be applied across disciplines to better connect scientific analysis with real-world decisions.

Daniel Morton — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:34:35 +0000

Right Here, Right Now 2025 Roundup Daniel Morton Thu, 12/11/2025 - 11:34

The second Right Here, Right Now Climate Summit was held in 2025. While the main event was hosted at Oxford University, in the UK, the plenary event was a 24 hour global event that explored climate change and human rights, that brought together leading voices in climate justice.

The hosts recorded events across the entires summit and have now made a broad range of materials available on-demand. Check out some of the resources below to learn more about the important discussions and ideas brought to the fore by this summit.

2025 Right Here, Right Now Global Plenary Session

Catch up on the 24-hour global plenary exploring climate change and human rights, bringing together leading voices in climate justice from across the globe.

Watch it now

Daniel Morton — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 18:07:13 +0000

CU �ֲ��ý Faculty Leadership Institute welcomes RASEI Fellow to 2025 Cohort Daniel Morton Thu, 09/11/2025 - 12:07

Daniel Morton

RASEI Fellow Srinivas Parinandi has been selected, along with 14 others, as a member of the 2025 Cohort of the CU �ֲ��ý Faculty Leadership Institute.

The CU �ֲ��ý Faculty Affairs Institute, (FLI), established in 2013, is a program that helps identify, foster, and support emerging leaders as they prepare to further their leadership trajectory. Now with over 150 Fellows, each cohort (typically ~12-15 members each year), has the opportunity to engage with campus leaders in targeted discussions around current campus issues and build leadership skills. Monthly meetings throughout the academic year provide focus on two main areas of impact:

Meetings with campus leadership
Leadership skill development

This year RASEI Fellow Srinivas (Chinnu) Parinandi was selected to the cohort. Srinivas is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at CU �ֲ��ý. Research in the team explores American Political Institutions with a focus on two main areas; how the design of regulation influences policy outcomes; and how institutional characteristics condition the spread, or diffusion, of policy. The primary emphasis of his work looks at energy and economic policy.

September 2025

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Social, Institutional and Behavioral Analysis

Not all Renewable Energy is Created Equal

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BES: Life Cycle-Based Decision Making for Sustainable Materials and Energy Systems

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Investigating how political polarization impacts efforts to address climate change

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The Long Shadow of Partisan Hostility: How Affective Polarization Hinders Democracies’ Ability to Mitigate Climate Change

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Historical and future learning for the new era of multi-terawatt photovoltaics

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Right Here, Right Now 2025 Roundup

2025 Right Here, Right Now Global Plenary Session

Browse the sessions from the Global Plenary Session

Download the Educational Materials Pack

Catch up on the local Oxford Program

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Impacts of novel wildfire disturbance on landcover and wildlife in boreal North America

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Managing no-shows in public resource allocation: The economics of campground reservations

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�ֲ���ý Climate Ventures Ignites Climate Tech Momentum with Fall Series

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CU �ֲ���ý Faculty Leadership Institute welcomes RASEI Fellow to 2025 Cohort

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�ֲ��ý Climate Ventures Ignites Climate Tech Momentum with Fall Series

CU �ֲ��ý Faculty Leadership Institute welcomes RASEI Fellow to 2025 Cohort