In just seven years, carbon emissions from electricity generation in Great Britain fell from 161 million tonnes of CO2 in 2012 to just 53 million tonnes in 2019. In a paper recently published in Joule, (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2021.09.011) Richard Green and Iain Staffell showed that Shapley values can be used to attribute these reductions across the large number of overlapping changes that happened over the period – additions to renewable capacity, closures of coal plants (for regulatory and other reasons), rising carbon prices and falling demand, among others. In this podcast, they talk about their approach, its findings, and how the method may be used in other contexts.
About Richard Green
Richard Green is Professor of Sustainable Energy Business at Imperial College Business School. An economist, he has been researching the economics and regulation of electricity markets for over thirty years. He is a past member of IAEE Council and a past Chair of the British Institute of Energy Economics.
About Iain Staffell
Iain Staffell is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Energy at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London. He is co-developer of the Renewables.ninja (https://www.renewables.ninja/), an open web platform that lets you simulate the hourly power output from wind and solar power plants located anywhere in the world. Iain also leads the Electric Insights (https://electricinsights.co.uk/) project, an interactive website and quarterly report on the supply, demand, price and environmental impacts of Britain's electricity.