Abstract
National energy models provide decarbonization strategies. Most national energy models focus on costs and greenhouse gas emissions only. However, this focus carries the risk that burdens shift to other environmental impacts. Energy models have therefore been extended by life-cycle assessment (LCA). Furthermore, deep decarbonization is only possible by targeting all high-emission sectors. Thus, we present a holistic national energy model that includes high-emission sectors and LCA. The model provides detailed environmental impacts for electricity, heat, and transport processes in Germany for meeting the climate targets up to 2050. Our results show that renewable energies and storage are key technologies for decarbonized energy systems. Furthermore, sector coupling is crucial and doubles electricity demand. Our LCA shows that environmental impacts shift from operation to infrastructure highlighting the importance of an impact assessment over the full life cycle. Decarbonization leads to many environmental cobenefits; however, it also increases freshwater ecotoxicity and depletion of metal and mineral resources. Thus, holistic planning of decarbonization strategies should also consider other environmental impacts.
Highlights
Climate change mitigation in line with the 1.5°C goal requires a massive reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IPCC, 2018)
We propose the national energy system model SecMOD
SecMOD optimizes the low-carbon transition of a national energy system with high spatial and temporal resolution and further includes life-cycle assessments (LCAs)
Summary
Climate change mitigation in line with the 1.5°C goal requires a massive reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (IPCC, 2018). Reduction measures mainly focus on the electricity sector through the integration of low-carbon technologies. GHG emissions can only be massively reduced by targeting other high-emission sectors, such as heating and transportation (Ruhnau et al, 2019). In low-carbon energy systems, the sectors electricity, heat, and transportation are interconnected via electricity. This sector coupling makes the development of a decarbonization strategy challenging (DeCarolis et al, 2017). To capture this challenge, decarbonization strategies can be developed based on national energy system models (Mirakyan and de Guio, 2015)
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