the EMPATHI framework
EMPATHI (Energy Metrics for Project Assessment of Trade-offs & Human Impacts) translates a user defined electricity sector intervention (generation addition, demand reduction, or fossil reduction) into projected avoided emissions and downstream climate, public health, and ecological outcomes through 2100. It covers thirteen technology options across all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and a national default, with up to twelve grid emissions projection schemes and five Shared Socioeconomic Pathways. It gathers scattered impact metrics into one defensible workflow by integrating EPA AVERT, NREL Cambium, EPA eGRID, and EPA COBRA derived health relationships. Its impact engine involves a reconstruction of the Bressler (2021) DICE-EMR mortality cost of carbon, decoupled from original assumptions and rebuilt to accept user provided inputs, an extension that makes the mortality cost of carbon a scenario dependent quantity at the project scale.
What is a metric tonne of CO₂?What is a Gtonne of CO₂?!
Every decision to build, or retire, a power plant is at once an economic, climate, and public health decision; and because the burdens and benefits land on different people, it's also a justice decision. Yet the metrics we usually offer (tonnes of CO₂, levelized cost) don't answer the questions communities are asking:
How many fewer asthma attacks in this school district?
How much sea level rise will it have averted by the time I can finally afford to buy a house?
What changes here, for people, if this plant is built, extended, retired, or replaced?
These questions have answers. The data, models, and assumptions required to produce those answers live in different scientific literatures, are maintained by different agencies, use different geographies, and have not been wired together in a form usable for project level screening. Up until now.
Geography ▸
The jurisdiction sets which grid your project acts on, which emission rates apply, and which health coefficients are available.
- States and DC
- All 50 states and the District of Columbia. A state that spans more than one AVERT region or Cambium area uses a blend of them unless you site it in one under Advanced.
- United States
- A national default, for questions asked at national scale. Cambium is not published nationally, so the four Cambium schemes are not offered here.
- Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico
- Covered for emissions and climate. EPA COBRA does not model these jurisdictions, so health reads N/A.
- Custom geography
- A grid this tool does not cover, including grids outside the United States. You supply the emission rates under Advanced and the tool does the rest. Emissions, climate and the equivalencies are calculated normally, and fossil reductions work if you also supply the retiring plant rates. Health is not available on a custom geography, because the health numbers depend on where the emissions happen and who lives downwind, which the underlying model covers for the United States only. The equivalencies are US yardsticks, an average US home and an average US passenger vehicle, and they are labeled as such.
Technologies: generation, demand & fossil reductions ▸
- Onshore Wind
- Utility-scale land-based wind feeding the regional grid. Default capacity factor ~37%.
- Offshore Wind
- Utility-scale turbines in coastal or Great Lakes waters, cabled to shore. Default ~42%.
- Utility PV
- Large ground-mounted solar selling directly to the bulk grid. Default ~25%.
- Utility PV + Storage
- Utility solar paired with batteries that shift output across hours. Storage shifts timing, not annual energy. AVERT does not publish a rate of change for storage-paired profiles, so the AVERT schemes are not offered.
- Distributed PV
- Customer-sited rooftop or carport solar on homes, businesses, or campuses. Default ~20%.
- Distributed PV + Storage
- Rooftop solar with behind-the-meter batteries for on-site use and limited export.
- Portfolio EE
- A mix of energy-efficiency measures (lighting, HVAC, industrial) that permanently lower electricity use.
- Uniform EE
- Idealized efficiency that cuts demand by the same amount in every hour of the year.
- Uniform Load Growth
- New round-the-clock demand: data centers, electrification, new industrial load. Uniform EE with the sign reversed, so results are negative because emissions are added, not avoided.
- Nuclear
- Firm, low-carbon baseload generation. Default ~91%.
- Gas Reduction
- A reduction in fossil gas-fired generation (retiring or curtailing a gas plant). Credits the plant's own emission rate, net of the chosen replacement. Illustrative default 100 MW; offered only where a gas fleet exists.
- Coal Reduction
- A reduction in coal-fired generation. Credits the plant's own (higher) emission rate, net of the chosen replacement. Illustrative default 300 MW; offered only where a coal fleet exists.
- Oil Reduction
- Retiring or curtailing oil-fired generation. Rare on the mainland but material in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, where oil still carries real load. Like the other fossil reductions it needs a replacement resource, and the plant's own rate is held fixed while the backfill grid decarbonizes.
Emissions-projection schemes ▸
How the grid your project displaces is assumed to change over the project's life. Not every scheme applies to every technology: the AVERT schemes need a published rate of change, and a specific gas or coal plant's own rate is held fixed regardless. Where a scheme cannot be applied the result reads N/A rather than a substituted number. For a gas, oil, or coal reduction it instead sets how fast the replacement (backfill) grid decarbonizes; the reduced plant's own rate stays fixed.
- Constant
- Today's grid emission rates held fixed for all future years. No policy or technology change assumed.
- Regional Goals
- Rates decline in a straight line from today to the region's stated clean-energy or decarbonization target years.
- AVERT 3 Year Linear
- Takes AVERT's 3-year rate of change and removes the same absolute amount every year. Bounded, and reaches zero on a datable year.
- AVERT 7 Year Linear
- The same arithmetic over a longer 7-year window.
- AVERT 3 Year Regression
- Fits a log-linear trend instead of taking the two endpoints, and compounds it, so the rate approaches zero without reaching it.
- AVERT 7 Year Regression
- The same fit over seven observations. The better-estimated slope, since it is not hostage to one noisy endpoint year.
- Cambium Mid-case
- NREL's central scenario for technology costs, fuel prices, demand, and policy (as of Aug 2024). Not available for National, AK, HI, PR.
- Cambium Low RE Cost
- Mid-case with cheaper renewables and batteries, so faster clean deployment and steeper emissions declines.
- Cambium High RE Cost
- Mid-case with costlier renewables, so slower deployment and flatter declines.
- Cambium High Demand
- Mid-case with higher electricity demand (e.g., faster electrification), which shifts the pace and shape of grid change.
- User Linear
- You set the annual decline yourself. The rate falls each year by a fixed percentage of the 2023 rate, so it is a straight line and reaches zero after 100 divided by your rate, in years. Available everywhere, including nationally, where Cambium is not published.
- User Geometric
- The same idea, compounding: the rate falls each year by a fixed percentage of the previous year, approaching zero without reaching it. One rate is applied to all six pollutants, which is a simplification: the measured trends differ by species, and sulfur dioxide has been falling several times faster than carbon dioxide.
Replacement resource (gas, coal & oil reductions only) ▸
When fossil generation is removed, something serves that load instead. This sets what, which determines whether the result is net or gross. The reduced plant's own emission rate is held fixed over its life; the projection scheme decarbonizes only the backfill grid.
- Grid's current marginal mix (net, default)
- Subtracts what the grid actually dispatches on the margin to backfill the lost output. The honest net effect. Can be negative if the backfill is dirtier than the plant reduced, which is common for gas and rare for coal or oil.
- Efficiency or zero-emission (gross)
- Assumes the lost output is met by efficiency or zero-carbon resources, so the plant's full emission rate is credited. The optimistic bound.
- Grid average intensity (benchmark)
- Nets against the fleet-average intensity. A benchmark, not a dispatchable backfill; the average includes zero-carbon generation that would not actually ramp to replace the plant, so it overstates the benefit.
Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) ▸
The global development and climate future used to scale population and climate-related impacts.
- SSP1-1.9
- Sustainable, low-inequality world with very aggressive mitigation (about a 1.5°C class outcome).
- SSP1-2.6
- Same sustainable path, slightly weaker mitigation (about a 2°C class outcome).
- SSP2-4.5
- Middle-of-the-road development and policy with intermediate emissions. A common default.
- SSP3-7.0
- Fragmented, regionally focused world with weak climate policy and high emissions.
- SSP5-8.5
- Fossil-fuel-intensive growth with very high emissions.
Capacity, capacity factor, start year & lifetime ▸
- Installed Capacity (MW)
- The project's nameplate size.
- Capacity Factor (0 to 1)
- The fraction of the time the project runs at full output over a year. A 0.91 nuclear plant generates far more energy per MW than a 0.25 solar plant.
- Start Year
- When the project comes online (2015 to 2100). Sets where on the projection and SSP timelines the analysis begins.
- Expected Lifetime (years)
- How long the project operates. Avoided impacts accumulate across this whole period.
Below the inputs is an Advanced checkbox. Turning it on reveals six independent blocks, each with its own checkbox. A block applies only while its own box is checked, so you can run one override at a time and see what it moves. Everything left unchecked keeps the published value.
Advanced: site the project in one AVERT region or Cambium GEA ▸
Offered where a jurisdiction spans more than one region. The default blends them all; picking one models a project sited inside it, which can change the answer substantially in a state split between a coal-heavy and a gas-heavy region.
- AVERT region
- Sets the marginal emission rates your project displaces, and the rate of change behind the four AVERT schemes.
- Cambium GEA
- Sets which NREL Cambium area the four Cambium scenarios are read from.
Advanced: override displaced grid rates ▸
The grid your project pushes off the system, in tonnes per MWh, for 6 species: CO2, CO2e, PM2.5, SO2, NOx and VOC. This replaces the AVERT marginal rate that every scheme anchors on, so the scheme you picked still sets the trajectory from your starting value. Leave a species blank to keep the published rate.
Two more fields take stack methane and nitrous oxide, as a ratio to the carbon dioxide rate you entered. They apply to a custom geography only. Left blank, both gases report N/A.
Use it to check this tool against another, to model a project whose displaced rates you already know, or to supply a grid the tool does not cover.
Advanced: override the retiring plant rates ▸
The specific fossil unit being reduced, in tonnes per MWh, same 6 species. This is the plant itself, not the grid around it, and it is read only for a gas, oil or coal reduction. Any other technology ignores it.
A measured heat rate from a real unit belongs here. Its rate is held fixed across the project life while the backfill grid decarbonizes along the chosen scheme.
Advanced: override the fleet average rates ▸
The regional fleet average, in tonnes per MWh. Read only when the Replacement Resource is set to grid average intensity, so it changes nothing under the other two replacement choices.
5 species here rather than 6. VOC does not have a published fleet rate anywhere in the framework and stays on the marginal backfill. On a custom geography there is no published fleet to fall back on, so a species left blank reports as not available rather than borrowing a United States figure.
Advanced: set the cost options ▸
Costs come from NREL ATB 2024 v4 in 2023 dollars, undiscounted, and do not include financing, tax credit or interconnection cost. Efficiency uses the Lawrence Berkeley cost of saved electricity. Changing anything here moves the cost figures only; emissions and health are untouched.
- Cost basis
- Lifetime undiscounted (capital plus fixed and variable operating cost across the whole life), capital only, or the published ATB LCOE.
- ATB scenario
- Moderate, Advanced or Conservative technology cost trajectory.
- Offshore mounting
- Fixed bottom or floating. Read for offshore wind only, where the two differ a great deal.
- Budget
- A dollar figure. The tool reports what capacity that budget buys and what it avoids, which is the form a funding question usually takes.
- Total cost override
- An absolute total for the whole project, not a rate per kW, and it outranks the model. This is the only route to a cost for a fossil reduction, a distributed storage pairing or a load addition, none of which the ATB prices.
Advanced: choose the climate sensitivity ▸
Equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), in degrees C per doubling of CO2. Blank uses the IPCC AR6 best estimate of 3.0. AR6 assesses the likely range as 2.5–4.0 and the very likely range as 2.0–5.0.
Temperature, ocean, sea-level, heat-exposure and heat-mortality results all follow it. Moving it changes only the feedback parameter in the two-layer energy balance model; the heat capacities and ocean uptake terms stay at their AR6 values, so a value other than 3.0 is a first-order sweep of the feedback rather than the model re-run at that sensitivity.
Set the water, land and lifecycle options ▸
Seven fields, all blank by default. Blank uses the default shown for the selected technology and geography, and a typed value is in force only while this box is ticked. Zero is a real override: a dry-cooled plant or a rooftop array uses no water.
- Project water withdrawal and consumption [gal/MWh]
- What the project itself draws and what it evaporates, per MWh. Wind 0, utility PV 26 for panel washing, nuclear about 20,000 and 450. For a fossil reduction these describe the retiring plant. Withdrawal and consumption differ by one to two orders of magnitude and mean different things: withdrawal drives thermal discharge and entrainment, consumption drives scarcity. Source: Macknick and others 2011 for wind and PV, the USGS 2020 fleet for nuclear and fossil.
- Displaced grid water withdrawal and consumption [gal/MWh]
- The rate credited to the generation the project displaces. A fleet average built from the USGS 2020 thermoelectric reanalysis over eGRID 2023 generation, not the marginal unit AVERT says the project displaces, and held flat over the project life. Published for the contiguous states only; elsewhere the water rows read N/A unless you enter a rate. For a fossil reduction this is the backfill, and it is zero on the gross basis.
- Project land footprint, direct and including spacing [acre/MW]
- Land the project occupies per MW of capacity. Only onshore wind differs between the two, because most of the ground between turbines stays farmed or grazed. Defaults: utility PV 2.5 acre/GWh (LBNL 2022), onshore wind 130 ha/TWh footprint and 12,000 ha/TWh including spacing, nuclear 6.5 ha/TWh, the median direct site area of 65 operating US plants with the uranium fuel cycle excluded (Lovering and others 2022; the 7.1 figure often quoted from that paper is its total, direct plus fuel cycle). Rooftop PV and efficiency are zero; reductions and load growth are N/A; offshore wind occupies seabed rather than land and reads N/A here, with its seabed area given separately. Boundaries differ by technology: the wind and nuclear figures include access roads and ancillary facilities, while the photovoltaic figure is the panel array and the ground between the rows, which is about a third smaller than the fenced facility. Fuel-cycle land and transmission are not counted.
- Project lifecycle GHG [tonne CO2e/MWh]
- The project's own manufacturing, construction, fuel cycle and decommissioning, per MWh, debited against the CO2e it avoids. NREL harmonized medians: onshore wind 12, offshore 19, utility PV 68, rooftop 56, nuclear 13 g CO2e/kWh. The debit is one-sided: the displaced fossil generation is counted at the stack.
- Site prior land cover (beta)
- What the project's footprint was before construction: cropland, pasture and hay land, shrubland and scrubland, grassland, forest, barren, or developed. Blank keeps the fleet distribution. Naming a class releases the carbon in its vegetation once, in the first year, and adds it to the lifecycle debit, so net CO2e, the lifecycle share and payback include it. IPCC 2019 Refinement Tier 1 stocks. Forest also loses its litter and dead wood; soil carbon is not counted, because on a solar site it depends on grading. Shrubland takes the grassland stock and is a lower bound, since IPCC does not publish a woody shrubland stock. Harvested wood is counted as emitted. Applies to utility PV, onshore wind and nuclear.
- Ground after conversion (beta)
- Vegetated keeps the IPCC grassland stock under and between the rows; cleared keeps none, as IPCC assumes for land converted to settlements. Blank is vegetated. Field studies disagree on whether shading lowers or raises plant growth under panels, so no adjustment is made.
- Site FAO ecological zone and IPCC climate zone (beta)
- The zones that key the forest stock and the grassland stock. Each defaults to the zone covering the largest share of your state, with that share shown; state the site's own zone where it differs. The lists offer only the zones found in your state, with their shares, and with Forest only the zones where IPCC publishes a forest stock; forest is not offered where the state does not have a forest zone. From the FAO Global Ecological Zones 2010 map and a reconstruction of the IPCC climate zone map. Where IPCC does not publish a stock for a class in a zone, the release cannot be computed and every figure that includes the lifecycle debit reads N/A until a zone with a published stock is stated.
- Site bird and bat collision rates (beta)
- Rates per MW per year from the project's own pre-construction or post-construction studies, for any technology. They replace the fleet rate, and the fleet's range is dropped because it does not describe a site figure.
- Project parameters
- The energy the project generates or saves each year, the year it retires, and how many average power plants of each fuel it displaces.
- Avoided emissions
- Greenhouse gases (CO₂e) and criteria air pollutants the project keeps out of the air, per year and over its lifetime. CO₂e counts the displaced generation's stack and the upstream fuel cycle that supplied it. Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico share a placeholder Cambium region that does not have a fuel split of its own, and a user-defined grid has none either, so for those the upstream term is not available and the headline says stack only. The nation takes its own national solve and does have the term.
- Equivalencies
- The avoided CO₂e net of the project's own lifecycle emissions, expressed in everyday terms: tree seedlings grown, homes' annual energy use, gasoline gallons, miles driven.
- Health outcomes
- Avoided pollution-related deaths, asthma symptoms, and hay-fever cases, plus the monetized value of those avoided damages. Deaths are given as a low, midpoint and high figure, and every individual endpoint can be opened both nationwide and for the source state alone.
- Climate & heat
- The project's small contribution to slowing temperature rise, the avoided heat-related deaths worldwide, and people spared from unprecedented heat exposure.
- Sea level
- The project's avoided contribution to sea-level rise, split into thermal expansion of the ocean and melt from glaciers, Greenland and Antarctica, plus a total and the land-ice mass loss behind it.
- Ocean warming
- Avoided temperature change in the upper 700 m of the ocean, which is where most of the heat taken up by the climate system goes.
- Cost and impact per dollar
- What the project costs over its life, that cost per MWh, and what a fixed 100 million dollars buys in avoided emissions, generation and avoided deaths. Enter a budget and the same figures are given at that budget. Beta. Costs are undiscounted 2023 dollars from NREL ATB 2024 and do not carry financing, tax credit or interconnection cost. Used for budget screening comparison between options.
- Water, land and lifecycle
- The trade-offs the carbon figures do not show. Water is the operational withdrawal and consumption the grid avoids, net of what the project uses; a negative figure means the project uses more water than the fleet it displaces, the usual result for nuclear against a gas-heavy grid. Land is the project's footprint in acres and acres per MW, with a second figure for onshore wind including the ground between turbines. The lifecycle row debits the project's manufacturing, construction, fuel cycle and decommissioning against the CO₂e it avoids, and reports what share that is and how long the project takes to pay it back. Beta. Water rates are a fleet average from the USGS 2020 thermoelectric reanalysis over eGRID 2023 generation, held flat over the project life, published for the contiguous states only, and not the marginal unit AVERT displaces. Land covers the site, not the fuel cycle or transmission. The lifecycle debit is set against the displaced generation’s stack and the upstream fuel cycle that supplied it; construction is the one part left outside. Sources: USGS (Harris and others 2023), NREL life cycle emissions factors, Lovering and others 2022, LBNL 2022, Macknick and others 2011.
- Wildlife, land cover and seabed (beta)
- What building the project costs, alongside what it avoids. For onshore wind, the birds and bats the project is expected to kill over its life, from post-construction monitoring at operating US facilities, resolved to your state or region. For utility PV, the prior land cover of the footprint, split across crop and pastureland, shrubland, developed land and the rest. For offshore wind, the seabed the foundations and their scour protection occupy permanently. Fatality rates are per MW of nameplate per year and are medians of a distribution spanning more than an order of magnitude. They describe a fleet of monitored projects; local risk depends on placement relative to ridgelines, migratory corridors and water, outside of this tool. Eagles are not included in this data. The bat figures include the compilers' caution that regional statistics are a point of reference and not a basis for comparison between regions. The land-cover split is the US fleet through 2021 applied to your acreage for scale. The seabed figure is permanent hard substrate only; construction disturbs a far larger area on a different timescale. Sources: REWI 2025 and AWWI 2020 (AWWIC), Levin and others 2025, ICF 2020 for BOEM. A collision rate entered for the site replaces the fleet rate for any technology.
- Land-use change release (beta)
- When a prior land cover is named, the carbon released by clearing it, in tonnes of CO2, with the stocks before and after per hectare. It sits with the lifecycle rows in the detailed emissions and is already inside the net figure. Forest cleared for utility PV adds roughly an eighth to a half again to the project's lifecycle debit, depending on the forest zone; a brownfield under planted ground is a small gain. IPCC 2019 Refinement Tier 1, biomass and dead organic matter only.
- Export the full results
- Every figure at full precision as CSV, as text, or copied to the clipboard, including the year-by-year series behind the charts.
- Share a link
- Copies a link that reopens the exact scenario, including anything entered under Advanced, so a result can be cited or checked by someone else.
Each run follows one path. Your project becomes an annual change in generation or load. That change is multiplied by marginal emission rates that evolve along the projection scheme you pick, giving avoided emissions year by year. For a gas, oil, or coal reduction the logic flips: the tool credits the plant's own (fixed) emission rate and subtracts a backfill rate that decarbonizes along the chosen scheme, so the result is net of replacement and may be negative. Those avoided emissions then feed the health, climate, temperature, ocean, and sea-level modules to produce the downstream results. The method is reduced-form: deterministic formulas chained together for fast, transparent, screening-level estimates.
The tool links dispersed datasets and research:
- Electricity system baselines and marginal emissions (EPA AVERT, EPA eGRID, NREL Cambium)
- Policy and scenario pathways (simple projection schemes, regional goals, and Cambium scenarios)
- Demographic and climate futures (SSPs, UN WPP / IIASA WiC population)
- Reduced-form air-quality and health damages (EPA COBRA, resolved by source state)
- Health coefficients are specific to the state the emissions come from, and the tool reports both the nationwide total and the share of it falling inside that state. Geography matters a great deal here: the same project can deliver several times more or less health benefit depending on how many people live downwind. EPA's COBRA does not model Alaska, Hawaii, or the territories, so those jurisdictions read N/A for health.
- Avoided deaths are reported as a range rather than a single number. The lower figure follows Wu et al. (2020) and the higher follows Pope et al. (2019); EPA reports these two studies separately and does not average them.
- Climate-mortality and physical-climate responses (mortality cost of carbon, temperature, ocean, and sea-level modules)
- Project costs and cost-effectiveness (NREL ATB 2024 v4 and the Lawrence Berkeley cost of saved electricity, in undiscounted 2023 dollars)
- Warming is not a fixed number of degrees per tonne. Each year's avoided tonnes enter a carbon-cycle impulse response and an AR6 two-layer energy balance model, so a tonne avoided in 2060 has warmed the planet less by 2100 than the same tonne avoided in 2030.
- Ocean heat uptake, thermal expansion and the glacier, Greenland and Antarctic contributions to sea level all follow that same temperature response, so they move together and move with the climate sensitivity you set.
- The mortality cost of carbon is reproduced from Bressler (2021).
- Costs are a screening comparison rather than a budget. They do not include financing, tax credit, interconnection or land cost, and the ATB does not price a fossil retirement, a distributed storage pairing or a load addition, which is why those need a cost entered by hand.
- Describing the site (beta) adds one more debit: the carbon in the vegetation cleared for the project, from IPCC Tier 1 stocks for the land cover and zone, released in the first year and carried through the same temperature and mortality chain as the rest of the lifecycle debit.
- Two blocks report what building and running the project demands. The first covers water, land or seabed, and lifecycle emissions. Water is reported net: the water the displaced fossil generation would have used, minus the project's usage. Land and seabed are the project's own footprint, without accounting for the plants it displaces. Lifecycle emissions are subtracted from the CO₂e the project avoids, giving the net figure, the lifecycle share and the carbon payback. The second block covers the birds and bats an onshore wind project is expected to impact, from post-construction monitoring at operating U.S. wind facilities, and, for utility solar, the land cover the U.S. solar fleet has converted, which describes the fleet a project joins unless the site’s own prior cover is stated. The displaced generation’s own wildlife fatalities and land cover are not credited against either.
Every source, dataset version and coefficient is listed in the Technical Reference, with the method for each figure.
Technical reference: McNevin, J. (2026). The EMPATHI Framework for Clean Energy Impact Assessment: Technical Reference Zenodo. doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21347959 CC BY 4.0. The methodology of record: data sources, governing equations, parameters, validation and limitations for every module.
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