About Optimize
Optimize is an hourly grid model that finds the cheapest way to decarbonize US electricity across 13 regions — and lets you put a price on two harms the market ignores to see how the cheapest grid changes.
What it is
For each region, the model runs the grid hour by hour and asks a single question: what is the least-cost mix of power sources that still keeps the lights on? On top of that, you can turn two dials — a price on carbon and a price on mortality — and watch the least-cost answer shift.
A price on CO₂ pollution that the electricity market never charges for.
A price per death — the accidents and air pollution that different power sources cause.
New here? Start with How it works.
Why price two externalities
Carbon isn’t the only harm the market leaves off the bill. Every source of power also costs lives, and the sources are wildly unequal. Pricing both lets you see the full trade-off instead of optimizing one harm while ignoring another. The goal is honesty about what a decision costs, not advocacy for a particular grid.
- Mortality coefficients are imported, not re-derived. They come from Level as a low/central/high band per source, and every figure links back to its source there.
- VSL is presented, never endorsed. The value of a statistical life uses HHS’s published range. We show the numbers as published values you can adjust — not as a figure we stand behind.
- Outputs are framed as conditions, not recommendations. A result reads as “what would have to be true — what carbon and mortality prices — for this to be the cheapest grid,” not “this is the grid you should build.”
What it doesn't claim
The model rests on real data and explicit assumptions, and those assumptions have limits: no transmission between regions, historical weather repeated forward, hourly (not sub-hourly) resolution, and more. Read them before trusting any single result.
- Methodology — the full list of assumptions, limitations, and data sources.
- Safety & mortality — how mortality is counted, framed, and where the numbers are uncertain.
Provenance and credit
Optimize is a web front end built around an existing modeling engine and data pipeline — the cliffgold/Optimize project. The optimizer, the spec sheet, and the grid model come from that repository; this site presents its results.
The runs are grounded in real US Energy Information Administration (EIA) hourly generation data across 13 regions — not synthetic or illustrative numbers.
For licensing and versioning details, see the methodology page.