Skip to Content
Uncategorized

The Expense of Renewables Is Outweighed by the Health-Care Savings They Provide

August 18, 2017

So says new research by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, who have studied the economic impact of clean-energy installations in the U.S. Their analysis of wind and solar systems between 2007 and 2015, published in Nature Energy, suggests that climate gains and health benefits from improved air quality brought about by clean energy were worth $87 billion to America during that time. The bulk of those savings are a result of averting as many as 12,700 premature deaths across the country, which would have otherwise been caused by polllution from traditional electricity generation methods like burning coal and gas. The $87 billion is, according to the team, “comparable to estimates of total federal and state financial support." In other words, the cost of renewables has been more than worth it over the last decade—and the best news is that they continue to get cheaper.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.