Princeton’s Net Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure and Impacts charts five challenging, tortuous, investment-intensive paths to “net-zero” by 2050. A presentation that contains 345 slides of text, colorful graphs and wide area maps provides details about the selected scenarios. The Princeton research team promises peer-reviewed journal articles in the near future.

According to sponsor organization promotional materials, the slide deck was released before the journal articles “in recognition of the urgency to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the need for immediate federal, state, and local policy making efforts.” There’s little doubt that the project sponsors and the authors have a strong policy-influence agenda.

All five chosen scenarios involve technology and infrastructure deployments “at historically unprecedented rates across most sectors.” They represent “expansive impacts on landscapes” that have not yet been planned in communities whose permission has not yet been obtained.
Overlooked path

The NZA study ignores a straight, wide, blazed trail. As documented in Goldstein and Qvist’s 2019 book titled A BRIGHT FUTURE: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow, several major electricity grids have successfully eliminated coal and been nearly completely decarbonized.

In those grids–France, Sweden, and Ontario–a combination of nuclear power and hydroelectricity did the job. In each case, it took about two decades of sustained effort.

None of history’s successful decarbonization efforts required a complete reordering of the economy. The nuclear energy portion of the country- or providence-wide efforts that now provide reliable, abundant electricity from non-combustion sources that do not dump carbon dioxide to the environment did not result in “expansive impacts on landscapes.”
Electricity can do most of the work

Though electricity is only a part of total energy use, the Princeton study makes the reasonable assumption that decarbonized electricity grids can be expanded to supply the energy services needed to decarbonize most of the rest of the energy supply.

That same assumption continues to work if the electricity decarbonization path includes a successful effort to improve nuclear energy products and projects. Unlike wind and solar, atomic energy is a thermal energy source that can directly supply heat energy useful for industrial processes. Some of the electrification expansions that NZA assumes to be necessary to supply all energy demands might be accomplished more affordably with direct heat use.