Abstract
Integrated assessment models are extensively used in the analysis of climate change mitigation and are informing national decision makers as well as contribute to international scientific assessments. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of techno-economic assumptions in the electricity sector among fifteen different global and national integrated assessment models. Particular focus is given to six major economies in the world: Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan and the US. The comparison reveals that techno-economic characteristics are quite different across integrated assessment models, both for the base year and future years. It is, however, important to recognize that techno-economic assessments from the literature exhibit an equally large range of parameters as the integrated assessment models reviewed. Beyond numerical differences, the representation of technologies also differs among models, which needs to be taken into account when comparing numerical parameters. While desirable, it seems difficult to fully harmonize techno-economic parameters across a broader range of models due to structural differences in the representation of technology. Therefore, making techno-economic parameters available in the future, together with of the technology representation as well as the exact definitions of the parameters should become the standard approach as it allows an open discussion of appropriate assumptions.
Highlights
Over the past few years, integrated assessment models (IAMs) of climate change have become increasingly influential in informing the climate policy debate
Beyond assessment reports that summarize the findings of the scientific literature (e.g., Refs. [1,2]), they are used in policy impact assessments [3] and in environmental legislative analysis reports of government institutions (e.g., [4,5])
Given the ambition to explore the possibility of limiting global temperature change to 1.5 C and the associated ratcheting up process of national contributions agreed upon in the Paris Agreement, it is expected that there will be a continuous demand for analysis from both global and national IAMs over the coming years to inform this process
Summary
Over the past few years, integrated assessment models (IAMs) of climate change have become increasingly influential in informing the climate policy debate. Given the ambition to explore the possibility of limiting global temperature change to 1.5 C and the associated ratcheting up process of national contributions agreed upon in the Paris Agreement, it is expected that there will be a continuous demand for analysis from both global and national IAMs over the coming years to inform this process Examples of such recent studies include Fragkos et al [7], Grubler et al [8], Gu and Wang [9], van der Zwaan et al [10] and van Vuuren et al [11]. As an example for both agreements and differences, the electricity sector which is responsible for roughly 40% of global greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions is robustly projected to decarbonize first under climate policy consistent with the 2 C target Despite this high-level agreement on the de-carbonization of the electricity sector, the speed of the transition and in particular the resulting technology mix in power generation can be very different across IAMs The rich supplementary material includes the full data set reviewed in this study and its visualization (Appendices C and E)
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