“Reducing United States’ GHG emissions by 80% by 2050 is possible” said Merrian Goggio Borgeson, senior scientist at Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), during a guest lecture for the students of the Energy Systems Management program at the University of San Francisco.

Merrian spends most of her time working with the Public Utilities Commission on Distributed resource planning and Integrated distributed energy resources. She’s also the lead of the Integrated Planning committee at NRDC. Merrian’s work seeks to answer the following question: “How can we plan at distribution level for new resources coming online e.g. DER?”.

NRDC partnered with Energy and Environmental Economics, Inc. to model solutions to reach the target of reducing GHG emissions by 80% in the next three decades. Merrian believes that by cutting energy use, investing in renewable energy and using near-zero-carbon electricity to displace direct use of fossil fuels, we can limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius.

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Thank you NRDC and E3 for your work towards helping build a sustainable future. Thank you Merrian for walking us through the complex problems and intricate solutions involved!