Abstract
Poland is the most coal-dependent economy and one of the biggest polluters in the EU. In order to alleviate this problem, meet CO2 emission requirements set by EU, and improve the country’s energy security, Poland decided to introduce nuclear power to its energy mix. So far, several potential locations for nuclear power plants have been officially proposed, mainly based on technical parameters, but no comparisons of the economic impact of such locations have been considered. Consequently, the main goal of this paper is to compare the national and regional economic effects of investments in nuclear power plants—for both the construction and exploitation phases—in the four most probable locations, which are similarly beneficial from a technical point of view. In order to simulate these effects, the spatial recursive dynamic Computable General Equilibrium model was calibrated until 2050 including agglomeration effects and featuring the regional economies of all Polish regions. The results show that although the construction phase is beneficial for economic development in all four regions, the exploitation phase is good for only one. The economies of the other regions suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from the Dutch disease. The paper argues that the regional economic effects of such an investment differ significantly, due to differences in the regions’ economic structures; hence, they should always be taken into account in the final decisions on the power plants’ locations.
Highlights
The EU aims to be a climate-neutral economy with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.This objective was established on 28 November 2018 in a document entitled “A Clean Planet forAll—A European Strategic Long-Term Vision for a Prosperous, Modern, Competitive and ClimateNeutral Economy” [1] and reinforced on 6 March 2020 in “Long-Term Low Greenhouse Gas EmissionDevelopment Strategy of the EU and Its Member States” [2]
All the changes are presented with respect to the counterfactual that is compared to the situation as if there is no power plant built
The results obtained from the Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) simulations with use of the POLTERMDyn model shows that the impact of the same investment—a nuclear plant worth 70 billion PLN (17.5 billion EUR)—has different impacts on the economy, depending on the region selected
Summary
The EU aims to be a climate-neutral economy with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.This objective was established on 28 November 2018 in a document entitled “A Clean Planet forAll—A European Strategic Long-Term Vision for a Prosperous, Modern, Competitive and ClimateNeutral Economy” [1] and reinforced on 6 March 2020 in “Long-Term Low Greenhouse Gas EmissionDevelopment Strategy of the EU and Its Member States” [2]. The EU aims to be a climate-neutral economy with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Energies 2020, 13, 2687 ensure that all EU policies contribute to this goal, where all sectors of the economy and society play their part, and that the transition to climate neutrality is irreversible This policy, is a huge and urgent challenge for countries in which economic growth is heavily dependent on natural resources and which generate a high level of greenhouse emissions. The most evident such case is Poland, which is the biggest polluter and the most coal-dependent economy in the EU. Above polluters, with and levelclose of the equal to 2.95Among
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