Reducing Project Delays, Costs and Risks with Public Health Impacts

Why energy developers should put avoided air pollution and public health impacts on the record, and what happens when they do.

By Daniel Howard, PhD, CEO of Quantum Energy

More than 80% of renewable energy projects are severely delayed or fail. Berkeley Lab’s 2024 data puts the cost of delay at roughly $200,000 per MW, which is $190 million of exposure on a 950 MW project. Delay also leads to cancellation. Two of the top drivers are community opposition and local planning and zoning barriers.

In most contested dockets that Quantum Energy has worked on, the developer’s record answers only the questions a regulator is required to ask: land use, wildlife, decommissioning, agricultural impact, and tax revenue. It rarely answers the question opponents actually argue about, which is whether the project is good or bad for the people who live near it. When the record is silent on that question, the opposition answers it for you.

This post is about closing that gap. A clean energy project physically reduces air pollution in the balancing authority where it operates. That reduction can be quantified in avoided emissions, years of healthy life saved, species protected and dollars, and it can be filed on the legal docket. We have done this for solar and wind projects that faced significant opposition, and each of them was approved. Below is what the analysis measures, why it changes the dynamics of a hearing, and how the numbers are made.

What a megawatt-hour physically changes

Start with a single hour. When a solar or wind project generates a megawatt-hour, the balancing authority needs one less megawatt-hour from another generator. Grid operators dispatch generation in order of cost, so in most balancing authorities the most expensive generation source running in that hour is the first to be displaced. That is usually natural gas or coal. Which fuel, and how much, depends on the region, the season and the hour. The response is not confined to one grid either. Because balancing authorities trade power with their neighbors, a project in MISO can turn down generators in MISO and in the balancing authorities around it, and the analysis identifies which specific generators those are.

When fossil generation is displaced, the air pollutants that would have been emitted in that hour are not emitted. Those pollutants would have dispersed and affected air quality concentrations over the following one to two weeks, depending on stack heights and meteorological conditions. So somewhere between a couple of hours and a couple of weeks after that megawatt-hour, people downwind are breathing less pollution.

Lower exposure means lower relative risk of disease. Epidemiological exposure-response functions quantify this relationship. Some of the diseases are acute, such as respiratory infections from short-term exposure. Others are chronic and come from long-term exposure: lung cancer, COPD, heart disease and cerebrovascular disease. Particulate matter alone has been traced to approximately 355,000 deaths per year in the United States, roughly 1 in 8 deaths¹.

The unit that carries this whole chain in one number is the disability-adjusted life year, or DALY – the World Health Organization’s standard measure of the burden of disease. One DALY can be thought of as one lost year of healthy life. One recent example, Vista Sands Solar in Wisconsin, is projected to save 2,485 DALYs in its first year of operation, which is approximately 1,000 people getting an extra 2.5 years of healthy life.

Carbon is global. Air pollution is local.

Carbon accounting answers one important question; quantifying avoided air pollution and public health impacts answers multiple additional questions. The two are different in a way that matters a great deal in a permitting hearing.

CO2 is a global pollutant. It is buoyant, it rises and mixes into the upper atmosphere, and its effect is spread across everyone on the planet. A tonne of CO2 avoided in Portage County, Wisconsin delivers the same climate benefit as a tonne avoided anywhere else, and none of that benefit lands specifically on the people in the hearing room.

Air pollutants behave differently. Fine particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and the secondary particles they form are dense. They disperse downward and outward from the stack and end up in the lungs of local and regional communities, where they cause asthma, respiratory infections, heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. When a project displaces coal and gas generation in its balancing authority, the health benefit accrues to the counties downwind of those plants. Those are frequently the same counties deciding on the permit.

This is why reporting additional public health impacts gets projects approved. A carbon number tells a commissioner the project is good for the planet. An avoided pollution and public health number tells the commissioner what the project does for the constituents in front of them, in years of healthy life and in dollars. In our experience, the second number is the one that generates positive outcomes.

Where the health number meets the developer’s balance sheet

For a developer, unquantified health benefits become quantified business costs at three predictable moments.

Permitting. Opposition groups routinely raise health concerns. If the record contains no quantified health evidence, the only health claims in front of the commission are the opponent’s. Every month of delay carries interconnection, financing and offtake risk, and a project that is reduced in size or denied is a write-off of development capital.

Offtake. Corporate buyers increasingly compare projects on impact as well as price. Two projects at the same PPA price are not equivalent if one displaces coal upwind of a dense population and the other displaces gas over open land. A quantified impact profile separates your project from the others in an RFP.

Financing and partnerships. Investors and large offtakers with disclosure obligations want verifiable impact data. ISO 14044-aligned figures that have been tested on a contested docket are far more useful to them than an attestation.

Before commercial operation, the analysis is a projection: a modeled estimate of what the project will displace, at hourly resolution, validated against how the grid has actually responded when comparable projects came online. After commercial operation, it becomes reporting: what the project actually displaced, computed from metered generation and reported grid data. Both belong in a developer’s toolkit. The first gets the project built. The second protects the value of what was built.

The advantage of putting it on the record

Here is the dynamic we have watched play out on multiple contested dockets.

A regulator has to justify a decision in writing, and that justification has to survive appeal. Quantifying avoided pollution, public health, ecosystem and economic impacts gives regulators the data-driven evidence they need to justify approving a project. At the same time, it puts anyone leaning toward denial in a difficult position. They now need a defensible justification for saying no to a project that the record shows will save thousands of years of healthy life and hundreds of millions of dollars in health and ecosystem costs for their own constituents.

Vista Sands Solar (1,315.6 MWac plus 300 MW of storage, Portage County, Wisconsin; Doral Renewables) is the clearest example. The project faced over 900 contesting comments on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission docket, along with a proposal to cut it by 365 MW. Doral contracted with Quantum Energy late in the process to quantify the project’s avoided pollution, public health, ecosystem and economic impacts. Our report was filed on the legal docket as an expert exhibit; in response, the tone toward the project shifted. On December 13, 2024 the Commission approved the full 1.3 GW with no setbacks, safeguarding approximately $450 million in capital investment². A June 2025 agreement with the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation preserved full capacity, and the World Economic Forum has since published the project as a Responsible Renewables Infrastructure case study.

Badger Hollow Wind Energy Center (118 MW, Iowa and Grant Counties, Wisconsin; Invenergy) followed the same path. Our analysis entered the PSC docket as expert witness exhibit Ex.-BHW-Howard-2, and the project was approved. Buckheart Solar (655 MW, Fulton County, Illinois; Doral Renewables) was approved with the same analysis in the record.

Three projects, two states, solar and wind, all approved after significant opposition. Quantified DALYs, species protected and economic value hold up under cross-examination when the methodology behind them does, which brings us to how the numbers are made.

What’s Behind the Numbers

TotalView, Quantum Energy’s impact analytics platform, was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation (Award 2230578). It is an energy system optimization model that simulates the electricity grid on an hourly basis, together with grid-level life cycle emissions and the public health, ecosystem and economic impacts of those emissions. The analysis follows the ISO 14040/14044 life cycle assessment framework and proceeds in three steps.

Step 1: Grid simulation. TotalView simulates hourly generation for the balancing authority for the most recent complete year, then backtests the results against generation reported to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Across all 69 U.S. balancing authorities the simulations fall within 1% of reported generation, with a coefficient of determination of 0.9999. The project is then added to the grid using its forecasted hourly generation profile (the 8760), and the model is re-run to determine what changes in each hour. Profiles at P50, P90 and P95 generation probability establish confidence intervals. For Vista Sands, the Year 1 result was approximately 2,296 GWh of solar generation displacing 1,216 GWh of natural gas, 950 GWh of coal and 117 GWh of hydro across MISO.

Step 2: Life cycle emissions inventory. For each hour’s change in generation, the emissions module quantifies the resulting changes in emissions and resource use. We run this at two scopes. The operations-only analysis covers the emissions from operating the generators that are turned down, which is where the local and regional air quality and public health impacts come from, and it is the analysis we typically present on a docket. The full life cycle analysis adds everything upstream and downstream of operation, from mining and processing raw materials through manufacturing, transport and disposal or recycling, on both sides of the ledger: the fuel extraction and transport behind a displaced megawatt-hour of gas, and the manufacturing of the solar panels counted against the project. Full life cycle results are available on request. In either scope, changes are quantified in each standard life cycle impact category and grouped into emissions to air (carbon, particulate matter, human toxicity, photochemical oxidants, ionizing radiation, ozone depletion), emissions to water (freshwater and marine ecotoxicity and eutrophication), emissions to soil (terrestrial acidification and ecotoxicity) and resource use (land transformation, material resources, non-renewable energy). Vista Sands Year 1: 1,624,113 tonnes of CO2-eq, 1,129 tonnes of PM2.5-eq, 3,260 tonnes of SO2-eq terrestrial acidification and 57,393 tonnes of 1,4-DCB-eq cancerous human toxicity avoided.

Step 3: Impact assessment. The changes in emissions are then traced down epidemiological and ecosystem impact pathways. The ReCiPe 2016 methodology, the industry standard life cycle impact assessment method for energy technologies, is used for the entire assessment, from the midpoint impact categories in Step 2 through to the health and ecosystem endpoints. For public health, the pathway runs from reduced emissions of NOx, NH3, SO2 and primary particulate matter, through atmospheric fate and chemistry, to reduced ambient concentrations, to reduced human intake, through exposure-response functions to changes in disease incidence, and finally to fewer hospital admissions and premature deaths. Location matters and is modeled. We identify the specific generators that are turned down, in the project’s balancing authority and in neighboring ones, and the meteorological conditions that govern how their emissions disperse, so the analysis shows which communities see the improvement in air quality. A tonne emitted upwind of a dense population does far more damage than the same tonne over open land. Parallel pathways run through soil acidification to terrestrial species loss and through aquatic toxicity to freshwater species loss. Public health is reported in DALYs and ecosystem quality in potentially disappeared fraction of species (PDF). As a final step, health economics and natural resource economics are applied to translate both of those metrics to real economic cost. Vista Sands Year 1: 2,485 DALYs saved, 5.3 PDF of species preserved and approximately $630 million in economic benefit, in addition to the direct, indirect and induced economic benefits calculated separately³.

Two properties in particular make these results highly defensible as independently verified evidence:

Hourly resolution. An average annual emissions factor erases the load curve that determines what a project actually displaces. A megawatt-hour at 2 p.m. in July does not displace the same generation as one at 2 a.m. in April, and MISO does not respond like ERCOT. TotalView resolves this hour by hour, for every balancing authority in the country.

Ranges, not a single number. Results include a cautious, expected and favorable case. The cautious case is typically still a clear benefit, so the claim in front of a commission is not that one number is exactly right. It is that even conservatively, the benefit is at least this much. Numbers built this way are sometimes lower than a headline claim, and that is exactly why they hold up under cross-examination.

The question to ask of your next project

Does the technical record for your next project answer the question opponents and commissioners actually care about: What does this project change for the communities surrounding the project itself, and in the locations surrounding the power plants that it turns down, and what are those changes worth? Quantum Energy’s TotalView analytics quantifies and maps the relevant impacts to communities within the project’s balancing authority and to relevant neighboring communities. Without these metrics, an energy developer has only a global answer (carbon) to a local concern.

Closing that gap is what TotalView does, and the evidence demonstrates that it materially improves project outcomes. We would be glad to walk through what an analysis looks like for a specific project or portfolio, including permit-ready technical reports, presentation materials for public hearings and expert testimony. Reach us at www.quantum-ec.com or contact@quantum-ec.com.

Frequently asked questions

What is a DALY in energy analysis?

A disability-adjusted life year is the World Health Organization’s standard unit for the burden of disease. One DALY represents the loss of one year of full health, combining years lost to premature death with years lived with illness, weighted for severity. In energy analysis, DALYs quantify the population health outcomes of a project’s hour-by-hour displacement of fossil generation and the resulting reduction in air pollution exposure. Vista Sands Solar is projected to save 2,485 DALYs in Year 1.

How are the public health impacts of solar and wind projects measured?

Through a three-step, ISO 14040/14044-aligned life cycle assessment. First, hourly grid simulation determines what the project displaces in its balancing authority, backtested against U.S. EIA reported generation across all 69 U.S. balancing authorities. Second, an emissions inventory quantifies the resulting changes across every impact category, covering emissions to air, water and soil and resource use, at an operations-only scope (typically presented, since it covers the local and regional impacts of operating the project) or full life cycle scope (available on request). Third, the ReCiPe 2016 methodology, used for the entire life cycle impact assessment, traces those changes down epidemiological and ecosystem pathways to human health in DALYs and ecosystem quality in PDF, which are then valued in dollars.

What is the difference between avoided CO2 and avoided air pollution?

CO2 is a global pollutant. It is buoyant, rises into the atmosphere and affects everyone on the planet more or less equally, regardless of where it was emitted or avoided. Air pollutants such as fine particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides are dense. They disperse downward from the stack and end up in the lungs of local and regional communities, where they cause asthma, respiratory infections, heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. Avoided CO2 is a climate benefit shared by the world. Avoided air pollution is a public health benefit that lands on the specific communities downwind of displaced power plants, which is why it belongs in a local permitting record.

Can these results be used as evidence in a permitting hearing?

Yes. Vista Sands Solar, Buckheart Solar and Badger Hollow Wind all faced significant opposition and were approved with this analysis in the technical record. Badger Hollow’s analysis was submitted as expert witness exhibit Ex.-BHW-Howard-2 on the Wisconsin PSC docket, and Vista Sands’ was filed as Ex.-VSS-Howard-2.

When in the development timeline should the analysis be done?

Earlier is better. Filing the analysis with the initial application means opponents are responding to your evidence rather than the other way around, and the same results can be reused in offtake conversations and community meetings. That said, Vista Sands was contracted late in a contested proceeding and still changed the outcome, so it is rarely too late to add it to the record.

Footnotes

1. Vohra, Karn, et al. “Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion: Results from GEOS-Chem.” Environmental research 195 (2021): 110754. ↩

2. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/12/17/vista-sands-1-3-gw-solar-project-approved-in-wisconsin/ ↩

3. https://apps.psc.wi.gov/ERF/ERFview/viewdoc.aspx?docid=509892 ↩