2020 Standard Scenarios Report: A U.S. Electricity Sector Outlook

The U.S. electricity sector continues to undergo rapid change. To help us and others understand the implications, drivers, and key uncertainties associated with this change, we are introducing this sixth installment of the Standard Scenarios. This year’s Standard Scenarios consist of 46 power sector scenarios for the contiguous United States (CONUS) that consider the present day through 2050 and have been studied using two models from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) along with a commercial production cost model:

-Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS): a long-term capacity expansion model from NREL (Brown et al. 2020)

-Distributed Generation Market Demand Model (dGen): a rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) diffusion model from NREL (Sigrin et al. 2016)

-PLEXOS: a production cost model from Energy Exemplar.