Developing a Greenhouse Gas GHG Calculator and Benchmarking Tool to Assess Clean Energy Program Impact

Under Governor Murphy’s leadership, New Jersey has taken bold steps to accelerate the state’s transition to a cleaner future. To ensure the State reaches its ambitious clean energy goals, New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA)’s tasked the Capstone team to develop a GHG calculator that can be used for quantifying program effectiveness for climate impact as a key performance indicator. 

The goal is to help NJEDA by finding examples of calculators used successfully elsewhere and proposing a calculator/tool that can be used by NJEDA to gauge program efficacy. As the NJEDA looks to develop additional clean energy and climate programs in the future, having an in-house calculator (which can be a modified version of existing calculators if most suitable) to use and tweak would be helpful. This calculator would be used not only to quantify the emissions/co-pollutants avoided as a result of projects enabled by NJEDA funding, but also to provide benchmarks (using social cost of carbon or other related metrics) to assess the environmental benefit per dollar invested. This will enable a better understanding of the impact and comparative value of different NJEDA funding opportunities.  The Capstone team will also test the proposed calculator to evaluate the impact of existing NJEDA programs that have already deployed funding using publicly available information.