摘要：SummaryTo further a just energy transition, jobs lost at retiring coal plants could be replaced by jobs at wind and solar plants. No research quantifies the feasibility and costs of such an undertaking across the United States. Complicating such an undertaking are workers’ place-based preferences that could prevent them from moving long distances, e.g. to high renewable resource regions. We formulate a bottom-up optimization model to quantify the technical feasibility and costs of replacing coal plant jobs with local versus distant jobs in the renewables sector. For the contiguous United States, we find replacing coal generation and employment with local wind and solar investments is feasible. Siting renewables local to instead of distant from retiring coal plants increases replacement costs by 5%–33% across sub-national regions and by $83 billion, or 24%, across the United States. These costs are modest relative to overall energy transition costs.Graphical abstractDisplay OmittedHighlights•We quantify costs of replacing coal plant with local versus distant renewable jobs•Local wind and solar can replace electricity and jobs from every U.S. coal plant•Replacing coal with local versus distant renewables increases U.S. costs by 24%•Cost increases are less than 10% for at least some coal plants in most U.S. regionsEnergy resources; Energy policy; Energy sustainability; Energy management; Energy Modeling
