Moksnes_2019_Environ._Res._Commun._1_025001.pdf (2.3 MB)
Download fileDeterminants of energy futures—a scenario discovery method applied to cost and carbon emission futures for South American electricity infrastructure
journal contribution
posted on 2021-01-11, 13:39 authored by Nandi Moksnes, Julie Rozenberg, Oliver Broad, Constantinos Taliotis, Mark HowellsMark Howells, Holger RognerEnergy policy and investment are commonly informed by a small number of scenarios, modelled with proprietary models and closed data-sets. It limits what levels of insight that can be derived from it. This paper overcomes these critical concerns by exploring a large number of scenarios with an open-data and open-source model to address regional mitigation policy. Focusing on South America, we translate an ensemble of long-term electricity supply scenarios into policy insights and use post-processing methods to present a systematic mapping of solution outputs to model inputs. We find demand levels, the cost of capital and the level of CO2-limits to be significant determinants of total investment cost. Low-carbon pathways are associated with low demand and low cost of capital. When cost of capital increases a shift away from wind and hydropower to natural gas and solar PV is seen. We further show that appropriate concessionary finance together with energy efficiency measures are critical—at a continental level—to unlock economic, low-carbon investment.
Funding
World Bank
Formas
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Geography and Environment
Published in
Environmental Research CommunicationsVolume
1Issue
2Publisher
IOP Publishing LtdVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by IOP under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence (CC BY 3.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Acceptance date
2019-02-13Publication date
2019-03-15Copyright date
2019ISSN
2515-7620eISSN
2515-7620Publisher version
Language
- en