New Jersey has released its 2024 Energy Master Plan, finalized and published in 2025. E3 supported the State by providing the technical modeling that informs several of the plan’s insights. The work quantified how various pathways perform on emissions, reliability, infrastructure, and household costs, giving New Jersey a shared analytical foundation for its policy decisions. The Energy Master Plan itself is authored by the State; E3’s contribution is the rigorous analysis that helped illuminate the range of options.
The modeling evaluates how New Jersey could reach its greenhouse gas reduction target (80% below 2006 levels by 2050) and an interim 100% clean electricity standard by 2035. The study also looks at the scale of demand side transformation needed to achieve the state’s goals, the pace of clean energy deployment required to serve a growing electric system, and the potential costs and benefits of the transition. The analysis gives State leaders a framework for understanding tradeoffs between future scenarios: how much clean generation and firm capacity New Jersey might need, what a higher electrification future implies for customer adoption of electric end use devices, and how policy pathways impact affordability and equity. Key findings include:
- All pathways that achieve the state’s decarbonization goal entail electrification of end uses and a shift in how residents use energy.
- These electric end uses are served by an increasingly clean electricity system, as mandated by New Jersey Executive Order 315, which establishes a goal of achieving a 100% clean electricity standard by 2035.
- Electrification of building heating end uses shifts New Jersey’s periods of highest electricity demand towards the winter, which creates future reliability challenges on the coldest days; managed electrification strategies such as hybrid heating and targeted demand management can play an important role in mitigating this “peak heat” challenge.
- New Jersey is projected to build a diverse mix of resources to decarbonize its electricity sector, including new nuclear, solar, and offshore wind. The analysis also highlights the need for balancing across multiple timescales to support the integration of renewables, including from resources such as battery storage to provide flexibility at the sub-hourly and hourly level, as well as firm capacity to maintain reliability during multi-day periods of low renewable output.
- Electrification entails both costs and benefits for residents. For example, it is cheaper to fuel an EV than it is a combustion vehicle in New Jersey, leading to fueling savings for those that electrify. However, the upfront cost of EVs and other electric devices, like heat pumps, present barriers to adoption, particularly for lower income households that can’t afford the premium.
- These findings give state leaders a big picture view of the choices that provide reliability, affordability, and progress toward a low carbon future.
