Over the past three years, some of the country’s biggest utilities have been committing to a goal that few may have predicted they’d undertake on their own: weaning themselves off carbon-emitting generation by 2050.
Driving this sea change in long-term planning is a combination of public pressure and energy economics. The falling costs of wind and solar power are pushing utilities to find ways to incorporate them into their long-range plans, even as they struggle to define what resources can be relied on to provide the dispatchable power they need.
