The U.S. now needs a Carbon Tax to transition from Gas to Renewables
Gas emissions must be halved (and coal eliminated) by 2030 to meet President Biden’s goal of a carbon free power sector by 2035. The problem is that gas additions are half the price of new wind and solar installations. Though the clean energy champions are still getting cheaper, so are gas additions. Nikos Tsafos at the Center for Strategic and International Studies looks at the policy options over the next decade for the U.S. The stark fact is that to drive the transition renewables must become cheaper than gas. But imposing a price on carbon or implementing a standard for emissions isn’t getting the cross-party support to make it into law. Instead, a Clean Electricity Payment Program, which rewards utilities for building renewable capacity and punishes them if they don’t, looks more likely. But designing the penalties correctly is going to prove very difficult. Tsafos says political consensus is therefore the main obstacle to the simplest and fastest way to ramping down gas, which is a carbon price. At $20 per ton of CO2, it would have raised a useful $29bn in 2020. At $50 it would make wind and solar cheaper than gas.
The United States reduced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the electricity sector by 40 percent between 2005 and 2020 as natural gas, wind, and solar replaced coal. President Biden wants to slash emissions further by 2030 and eliminate them by 2035.
But to meet this goal, the country can no longer rely on the main lever it has deployed so far to reduce emissions—switching from coal to gas. Instead, the rate of decarbonisation will depend on new solar or wind facilities being cheaper to construct that it is to operate an existing plant on fossil fuels.

美国现在需要征收碳税，以从天然气向可再生能源过渡
为了实现拜登总统提出的在2035年前实现电力行业无碳的目标，必须在2030年前将天然气排放减半(并消除煤炭)。问题是，新增天然气的价格是新建风能和太阳能装置价格的一半。虽然清洁能源的价格仍在下降，但天然气的价格也在下降。战略与国际研究中心的Nikos Tsafos研究了美国未来十年的政策选择。一个明显的事实是，要推动转型，可再生能源必须比天然气更便宜。但是，对碳排放定价或实施排放标准并没有得到跨党派的支持，使之成为法律。相反，一项“清洁电力支付计划”(Clean Electricity Payment Program)似乎更有可能实施，该计划奖励建设可再生能源能力的公用事业公司，如果不建设就惩罚它们。但是设计正确的点球将是非常困难的。Tsafos说，因此，政治共识是降低天然气价格的最简单和最快的方法的主要障碍，这就是碳价格。以每吨二氧化碳20美元的价格计算，到2020年，它将筹集290亿美元的资金。50美元的价格将使风能和太阳能比天然气更便宜。
2005年至2020年，随着天然气、风能和太阳能取代煤炭，美国电力部门的二氧化碳排放量减少了40%。拜登总统希望到2030年进一步削减排放，到2035年消除排放。
但要实现这一目标，中国已不能再依赖迄今为止为减少排放所采用的主要手段——从煤炭转向天然气。相反，脱碳的速度将取决于新的太阳能或风能设施的建设成本是否比使用化石燃料的现有电厂更低。

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