Evaluating a Proposed 20% National Renewable Portfolio Standard

This paper provides a preliminary analysis of the impacts of a proposed 20% national renewable portfolio standard (RPS) by 2021, which has been advanced in the U.S. Congress by Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. The paper was prepared before the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama on February 17, 2009, and thus does not consider important changes in renewable energy (RE) policy that need to be addressed in follow-on analysis. We use NREL's Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) model to evaluate the impacts of the RPS requirements on the energy sector and consider design issues associated with renewable energy certificate (REC) trading markets.