During the summer of 2024, I worked with RMI on expanding their Economic Dispatch Hub to include the health impacts of coal plant emissions during uneconomic hours.

Uneconomic dispatch, put simply, is when expensive coal plants “cut the line” and run on our energy grid when there are more affordable energy sources available. This adds costs to customers’ bills and causes unnecessary emissions to be released into our atmosphere. The goal of my summer project was to show how these emissions increase these costs even further (spoiler alert: they do. a lot.).

Using the EPA’s COBRA model, we found that billions of dollars of health impacts each year are attributed to uneconomically dispatched coal emissions, costing thousands of missed days of school and work, detracting from our education and wallets. These impacts were found to be more prominent in low-income counties throughout the country, exacerbating the disproportionate environmental justice issues that are already riddling these communities.