Decarbonizing the electricity system while meeting rising demand, minimizing costs, and managing infrastructure deployment risks is one of the central challenges of the energy transition. Wind, solar, storage, transmission, and demand-side solutions are indispensable, and scaling them significantly and quickly is essential. But evidence from decades of electricity system analysis shows that relying on these resources alone makes the path to a fully clean grid more challenging, expensive, and riskier than it needs to be.
As our new report from CATF report lays out, that is where clean firm generation technologies come in. By delivering clean electricity that is available whenever it is needed, independent of weather, clean firm resources - like geothermal, nuclear energy, and fossil generation with high levels of carbon capture - can reduce the scale of infrastructure required, lower total system costs, and expand the set of viable pathways to deep decarbonization.
Clean firm reduces the infrastructure buildout needed to reach a clean grid
A large body of academic and industry system modeling shows that access to clean firm generation fundamentally alters how much wind, solar, storage, and transmission must be built to meet demand reliably (Figure 1). Because clean firm resources operate at high utilization rates, remain available during prolonged periods of low wind and solar output, and do not have seasonal generation patterns, they dramatically reduce the amount of clean energy resources needed to achieve decarbonization targets.
Across studies, adding clean firm capacity consistently shrinks total system buildout, reducing total generation, storage, and transmission capacity, cutting land use, material requirements, and critical mineral demand to deliver a fully decarbonized power system. In some high-electrification scenarios, each gigawatt of clean firm capacity offsets several gigawatts of variable renewables and storage that would otherwise be required.
