Climate Progress 2024: REPEAT Project's Annual U.S. Emissions Pathways Update

In this Summary Report, we provide high level results from REPEAT Project’s 2024 Annual U.S. Emissions Pathways Update. A final report with further detailed findings and an updated data portal with quantitative results will be published soon at repeatproject.org.

In this annual update, we have revised all assumptions to reflect the latest data available as of Spring 2024, including updating macro-economic conditions, fuel costs, and electricity technology cost assumptions. Compared to 2023, this update includes a notable increase in economic outlook and overall demand for energy services as well as an increase in project finance costs and real capital costs for several technologies due to recent inflation. Additionally, with two years now since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, we now have better visibility on near-term market conditions under the current policy environment. As such, we carefully benchmarked 2023 modeled results against actual outcomes, available data on announced projects, and several published industry outlooks, resulting in a comprehensive update to near-term capacity deployment constraints.

This analysis includes three Current Policies scenarios (‘Conservative’, ‘Mid-range’, and ‘Optimistic’) which reflect uncertainty about policy effectiveness and the potential impacts of constraints on supply chains and other rate-limiting factors. Note that each Current Policies case employs consistent macro-economic assumptions. In this annual update, the Current Policies scenarios also include a set of recently finalized federal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, on-road vehicles, and oil & gas methane emissions, as well as all finalized appliance and lighting efficiency standards. The report also presents two benchmark scenarios: a Frozen Policies (Jan. ‘21) scenario which only reflects policies enacted as of the start of the 117th Congress in January 2021; and a Net-Zero Pathway scenario, which reflects a cost-effective pathway to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from 2024 levels to net-zero by 2050, consistent with the United States’ long-term climate mitigation goals. 

Given the significant uncertainty about future outcomes, all results in this report should be considered approximate. REPEAT Project updates our analysis regularly as new data and inputs become available and new policies are proposed and enacted. 

Note that this work has not been subject to formal peer review.