Reply to the ‘Comment on “Powering sustainable development within planetary boundaries”’ by Y. Yang, Energy Environ. Sci., 2020, 13, DOI: 10.1039/C9EE01176E

Abstract

In our recently published work, we incorporated planetary boundaries in the optimization of the United States (US) power sector in 2030. Yang claims there is a double-counting error in our results and encourages us to minimize direct emissions instead of life cycle emissions in our model. Here, we argue that Yang's main criticism based on the risk of double-counting emissions when multiple sectors are simultaneously optimized does not apply to our case study, in which only one sector – the power sector – is analyzed. To assess the implications of Yang's suggestion to minimize direct emissions, we repeated the calculations optimizing direct emissions instead of life cycle emissions. We found that this approach is unable to discriminate effectively between electricity production technologies and, consequently, leads to a suboptimal mix with impacts on climate change, ocean acidification and freshwater use 102, 33 and 1.5 times the limits, respectively, whereas our original solution meets all planetary boundaries concurrently. Our findings imply that Yang's suggestion of optimizing direct emissions in energy systems models might not the best way forward in single-sector studies like ours.