The Power of Change: Innovation for Development and Deployment of Increasingly Clean Electric Power Technologies

Electricity, supplied reliably and affordably, is foundational to the U.S. economy and is utterly indispensable to modern society. The National Academy of Engineering has called electrification the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century (Constable and Somerville, 2003). Generating electricity also creates pollution, however, especially emissions of air pollutants. While the most severe and life-threatening pollution from electric power plants is largely a thing of the past in America, power plant emissions of particulates as well as oxides of nitrogen and sulfur (NOx and SOx) 1 still cause harms and contribute to increases in morbidity and mortality (Bell et al., 2008; Laden et al., 2006; Pope et al., 2009). Those harms include premature deaths, contributions to illnesses such as asthma, and increased hospitalizations, and electricity prices do not fully incorporate the costs of those harms (NRC, 2010b). Harms from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—to which the power sector is an important contributor, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all domestic emissions (EPA, 2016)— remain almost completely unpriced and thus above the level they would be if market prices reflected their full costs.