Assessing the Public Health Impacts: A Comprehensive Analysis of Health Externalities Related to Power Grid Expansion Plans

Power grid expansion decisions often are made based on models that minimize market costs, ignoring externalities that may have significant harmful financial and societal impacts. Such approaches portray an incomplete assessment of the effects of potential electrification policies. This research effort evaluates specific policy scenarios which are designed both to plan for essential energy resources and to achieve societal goals concerning air emissions and the health impacts of those emissions. We developed a generation expansion planning optimization model to determine the least cost decisions for annual aggregate electrical generation, purchasing, and capacity investment given a modular set of economic, environmental, and policy constraints. We estimate the resulting pollutants and other harmful emissions from our optimal solutions to approximate the incurred health damages both as enumerated occurrences and as an aggregate financial burden. We also test several other less environmentally motivated expansion policies. These system-level simulation models of the electric power system serve as decision-support tools to help answer a variety of energy policy questions. This work specifically focuses on the negative human health consequences of electricity generation. Fossil fuel utilization contributes to many health conditions which, beyond contributing negatively to the general state of social wellness, cause significant financial burdens. Our findings ultimately show that the implementation of renewable electrification plans result in significant abatements of all negative health occurrences. These include work loss days, hospital admittances, emergency room visits, and mortalities. Furthermore, relinquishing environmental restrictions, focusing solely on the minimization of electrical plan costs, results in increases in those same factors.