Optimal Ozone Control with
Inclusion of Spatiotemporal
Marginal Damages and Electricity Demand
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Abstract
Marginal
damage (MD), or damage per ton of emission, is a policy
metric used for effective pollution control and reducing the corresponding
adverse health impacts. However, for a pollutant such as NO<sub><i>x</i></sub>, the MD varies by the time and location of the emissions,
a complication that is not adequately accounted for in the currently
implemented economic instruments. Policies accounting for MD information
would aim to encourage emitters with large MDs to reduce their emissions.
An optimization framework is implemented to account for NO<sub><i>x</i></sub> spatiotemporal MDs calculated through adjoint sensitivity
analysis and to simulate power plants’ behavior under emission
and simplified electricity constraints. The results from a case study
of U.S. power plants indicate that time-specific MDs are high around
noon and low in the evening. Furthermore, an emissions reduction of
about 40% and a net benefit of about $1200 million can be gained for
this subset of power plants if a larger fraction of the electricity
demand is supplied by power plants at low-damage times and in low-damage
locations. The results also indicate that the consideration of temporal
effects in NO<sub><i>x</i></sub> control policies results
in a comparable net benefit to the consideration of spatial or spatiotemporal
effects, thus providing a promising option for policy development