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ARTICLE · 05 JANUARY 2021

Massachusetts Releases Its 2050 Decarbonization Roadmap — It's Going To Be Quite A Trip

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Yesterday, Massachusetts released its "2050 Decarbonization Roadmap." I'm tempted to call it a tour de force. At the very least, it's jam-packed with important issues.

United StatesEnergy and Natural Resources
Seth Jaffe
Seth Jaffe
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Yesterday, Massachusetts released its "2050 Decarbonization Roadmap." I'm tempted to call it a tour de force. At the very least, it's jam-packed with important issues. One of the most valuable aspects of the Roadmap is its discussion of the potential tradeoffs among the different paths towards a decarbonized economy. Acknowledging that the Roadmap contains much more good stuff than can be summarized in a single post, I'm going to focus in this post on some of the key choices that are going to have to be made among the various options discussed.

Here goes:

  • We're going to have to choose a lot of offshore wind. The Roadmap views the "Limited Offshore Wind" pathway as anything less than 30 gigawatts. Importantly, the Roadmap concludes that, if we don't build more than 30 GW of offshore wind, we're going to need to construct new nuclear power plants to reach our decarbonization target.

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