Assessing the equality and sustainability impacts and trade-offs of the energy transition in the United States

 The U.S. electricity system is rapidly changing to meet decarbonization goals. However, there is  a risk of continuing historical inequities (e.g., air pollution burden disparities) from the current  power system into the future. In this dissertation, I quantify sustainability and equality impacts  from different decarbonization pathways in the U.S. These analyses show how decarbonization  decisions may impact different demographic groups and how different goals of  decarbonization may have trade-offs between sustainability outcomes. In Chapter 2, I quantify  the air pollution disparities across regions and demographic groups across eight  decarbonization scenarios. I tie a capacity expansion model to a reduced complexity air  pollution model to capture community level impacts. I provide policy implications given the  differences in air pollution disparities across demographics and decarbonization scenarios.  This chapter lays a framework for evaluating equality in air pollution impacts given national  level decarbonization decisions. In Chapter 3, I evaluate the trade-offs across sustainability  criteria for 32 decarbonization outcomes in 2050. I look at economic, environmental, and social  sustainability across eleven unique stakeholder preference scenarios. Under social  sustainability, I specifically focus on distributional equality criteria. I also discuss the impacts  of policies on overall sustainability performance in 2050. In Chapter 4, I evaluate how different  spatial resolution and downscaling methodologies, which have been used to estimate air  pollution burden across race/ethnicity groups resulting from national level decarbonization  decisions, impact the estimated magnitude of burden across groups. I look across four different  sensitivities and quantify how the spatial resolution of data will impact outcomes of air  pollution burden. This dissertation concludes with policy recommendations and lessons  learned from my previous three chapters.