The Impact of Renewable Electricity Mixes on Residential Electricity Costs, Land-Use, and Carbon Emissions via the Energy Futures Dashboard

The Energy Futures Dashboard (EFD) is a user-friendly online and open-source energy modeling tool that provides non-energy professionals with a way to explore their own energy future in minutes. Because the EFD is easy to use for those with minimal knowledge of energy system issues, it serves as a complement, not a replacement, to models that have more detail and resolution, but take specialized knowledge and hours to run each simulation. The main purpose of this paper is to use the EFD to provide insights into how future energy choices reveal tradeoffs in electricity costs, land use of wind and solar farms, and carbon emissions by summarizing results of thousands of simulations for each of thirteen regions of the continental U.S.