The Inflation Reduction Act and US Progress on the Path to Net-Zero

It has been two years since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark U.S. law investing over $500 billion to ‘put clean energy on sale’ and incentivize the manufacture, deployment, and use of low-carbon technologies. But will it be enough to put the United States on track for net-zero or to meet the nation’s 2030 climate goals? Led by Prof. Jenkins, the REPEAT Project (repeatproject.org) assesses the impact of federal energy and climate policies as they are proposed, debated, and enacted. This talk will share the project’s latest findings and identify progress and remaining gaps on the path to net-zero, as well as discuss the limitations and impact of public-facing modeling of federal policies in ‘close to real time.’

Biography:

Jesse D. Jenkins is an assistant professor and macro-scale energy systems engineer at Princeton University with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment. He leads the Princeton ZERO Lab (Zero-carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory), which focuses on improving and applying optimization-based energy systems models to evaluate and optimize low-carbon energy technologies, guide investment and research in innovative energy technologies, and generate insights to improve energy and climate policy and planning decisions. Dr. Jenkins earned a PhD in engineering systems and masters in technology and policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked previously as a postdoctoral environmental fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and spent six years as an energy and climate policy analyst prior to embarking on his academic career. Dr. Jenkins served on the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine expert committee on Accelerating Decarbonization of the U.S. Energy System, was a principal investigator and lead author of Princeton's landmark Net-Zero America study, and leads the REPEAT Project (repeatproject.org), which provides regular, timely, and independent environmental and economic evaluation of federal energy and climate policies as they’re proposed and enacted. He has published 38 peer-reviewed papers to date in high-impact journals including Science, Nature Energy, Joule and Applied Energy. Dr. Jenkins has delivered invited testimony to multiple Congressional committees, his research is frequently featured in major media outlets, and he is the co-host of the podcast Shift Key on the transition away from fossil fuels.