Public Health
The Full Cost of Electricity study seeks to quantify the costs associated with different generation technologies, and how those costs interact with the cost of electric delivery, consumption, and to determine the total direct and indirect costs of electricity.
Public Health externalities are the indirect costs that electricity generation, delivery, and consumption place on society through increased morbidity (sickness) and mortality (premature death), but are not included in the consumer price of electricity. Some of these costs end up as part of healthcare costs, for example. The primary public health costs of electricity are respiratory and cardiovascular health conditions prompted or exacerbated by breathing pollution produced from fossil fuel combustion.
Related Energy Institute Publications
EPA’s Valuation of Environmental Externalities from Electricity Production
New U.S. Power Costs: by County, with Environmental Externalities
Download a PDF of the full white paper.
Read a related blog post at IEEE Spectrum
Journal Publication:
Rhodes, Joshua D., King, Carey, Gülen, Gürcan, Olmstead, Sheila M., Dyer, James S., Hebner, Robert E., Beach, Fred C., Edgar, Thomas F., Webber, Michael E.. “A geographically resolved method to estimate levelized power plant costs with environmental externalities,” Energy Policy, 2017, 102 (March 2017), 491-499, doi: 10.1016/j.enpol.2016.12.025. View paper free online here or download PDF.