The Clean Power Plan’s implementation costs and impact on the nation’s electric portfolio depend largely on the compliance mechanisms that states will choose to implement (or in the case of states who say no, that EPA will choose to implement). Nevertheless, there are several options one can use to model potential costs and impacts.
In developing the rule, EPA used the Integrated Planning Model (IPM) v. 5.15 to analyze CPP costs and the potential for the electric sector to comply with each of EPA’s proposed building blocks. EPA stated that IPM “is a multi-regional, dynamic, deterministic linear programming model of the U.S. electric power sector that the EPA has used for over two decades to evaluate the economic and emission impacts of prospective environmental policies.” More information about EPA’s IPM analysis and the modeling assumptions it used to conduct the analysis can be found here.
Colorado State University, through its Western States Clean Power Plan Initiative, has developed an inventory of various CPP models that is available here. The inventory includes a link to each modeling tool, a description of potential inputs and the expected outputs of the model, and a note on whether the model has been updated since the release of the CPP.
