Carbon Mitigation from Fuel-Switching in the U.S. Power Sector: State, Regional and National Potentials

A bottom-up analysis of 2012 data suggests that re-dispatching the fleet of coal generating units to natural gas combined-cycle generation holds the technical potential to mitigate over 500 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or about 25 percent of the sector's total emissions in 2012. As expected, mitigation potential generally increases with spatial aggregation and combined-cycle utilization level.