• Energy Research

In a climate constrained future, hybrid energy-economy model coupling gives additional insight into interregional competition, trade, industrial delocalisation and overall macroeconomic consequences of decarbonising the energy system. Decarbonising the energy system is critical in mitigating climate change. This chapter summarises modelling methodologies developed in the ETSAP community to assess economic impacts of decarbonising energy systems at a national level. The preceding chapter focuses on a global perspective. The modelling studies outlined here show that burden sharing rules and national revenue recycling schemes for carbon tax are critical for the long-term viability of economic growth and equitable engagement on combating climate change. Traditional computable general equilibrium models and energy systems models solved in isolation can misrepresent the long run carbon cost and underestimate the demand response caused by technological paradigm shifts in a decarbonised energy system. The approaches outlined within have guided the first evidence based decarbonisation legislation and continue to provide additional insights as increased sectoral disaggregation in hybrid modelling approaches is achieved.

Abstract Aiming to lead amongst other G20 countries, the UK government has classified the twin energy policy priorities of decarbonisation and security of supply as a “centennial challenge”. This viewpoint discusses the UK's capacity for energy modelling and scenario building as a critical underpinning of iterative decision making to meet these policy ambitions. From a nadir, over the last decade UK modelling expertise has been steadily built up. However extreme challenges remain in the level and consistency of funding of core model teams — critical to ensure a full scope of energy model types and hence insights, and in developing new state-of-the-art models to address evolving uncertainties. Meeting this challenge will facilitate a broad scope of types and geographical scale of UK's analytical tools to responsively deliver the evidence base for a range of public and private sector decision makers, and ensure that the UK contributes to global efforts to advance the field of energy-economic modelling.

This paper discusses the design and development of the Open Source Energy Modeling System (OSeMOSYS). It describes the model’s formulation in terms of a ‘plain English’ description, algebraic formulation, implementation—in terms of its full source code, as well as a detailed description of the model inputs, parameters, and outputs. A key feature of the OSeMOSYS implementation is that it is contained in less than five pages of documented, easily accessible code. Other existing energy system models that do not have this emphasis on compactness and openness makes the barrier to entry by new users much higher, as well as making the addition of innovative new functionality very difficult. The paper begins by describing the rationale for the development of OSeMOSYS and its structure. The current preliminary implementation of the model is then demonstrated for a discrete example. Next, we explain how new development efforts will build on the existing OSeMOSYS codebase. The paper closes with thoughts regarding the organization of the OSeMOSYS community, associated capacity development efforts, and linkages to other open source efforts including adding functionality to the LEAP model.

With recent events having highlighted the need to consider deliberate attacks when planning electric power systems, it is pertinent to make a quantitative comparison of an electricity system based on distributed natural-gas-fired units to a traditional system based on large centralized plant. The distributed system proves to be up to five times less sensitive to measures of systematic attack.

AbstractMega structures for CO2 storage, such as the Utsira formation in the North Sea, could theoretically supply CO2 storage capacity for several countries for a period of several decades. Their use could increase the cost-effectiveness of CCS in a region while minimizing opposition from the public to CO2 storage. However, this will not only depend on their potential available capacity to store CO2 flows but also on the cost effectiveness of such an option within national portfolios of mitigation measures. This article shows key results of a research project aiming to assess the potentials and costs of storing CO2 in the Utsira formation for the time period 2015–2050. Countries included in the analysis are Denmark, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The starting point of the analysis are the national MARKAL and TIMES models developed for each country together with the 27 region Pan European TIMES model (PET). In the models scenarios, assumptions and parameters that are not country dependent (e.g. costs related with CO2 capture technology development) have been harmonized. The results indicate that with stringent climate targets, CCS appears as a key mitigation option in the national portfolio of measures. Within the CCS portfolio, storage of CO2 in the Utsira formation can indeed be a cost effective option for North Europe and it represents a valuable CO2 storage option at the regional level. For instance, the United Kingdom will profit from the comparably short transport distance to Utsira while the Netherlands utilise the Utsira formation due to limited domestic low cost storage fields and the use of the country as a regional hub for CO2. In Germany and Denmark, the competitiveness of CO2 storage in Utsira is determined by the availability of domestic onshore saline aquifers. If these aquifers are not used, Utsira gains as competitive storage option. The main limitation for the common use of the Utsira formation appears, from a modeling point of view, to be the maximum annual injection rate for CO2 that has been assumed in the project (150 Mt CO2/yr).

Distributed generation (DG) offers a number of potential benefits, but questions remain about environmental performance. Air emissions from five key DG technologies; gas engines, diesel engines, gas turbines, micro-turbines, and fuel cells, were systematically compared with total energy supply systems based on centralized gas turbines (CCGT) and coal steam turbines plus distributed heating (DH) using gas-fired boilers. Based on emissions and operational factors from existing commercially marketed DG-CHP technologies, combined heat and power (CHP) applications are considered, which are remotely monitored and operated as base-load supply. Emissions results are characterized using heat-to-power ratios (HPRs), which concisely describe different types of energy demand under different applications or seasonal conditions. At an HPR of zero (i.e. the special case of electricity-only), CCGT with DH gives the lowest emissions portfolio, but at HPR values typical for buildings in the United States, efficiency advantages ensure gas-fired combustion DG-CHP technologies become broadly competitive across the range of key emissions. Fuel cell DG-CHP provides a very low emissions portfolio, but at a significant cost premium. At higher HPR values, emissions from heat supply can become a key issue, leading to the surprising finding that some combustion-based DG-CHP systems have lower total emissions than fuel cell-based systems. Based on these insights, the paper concludes with a discussion of streamlined yet rigorous regulatory approaches for DG-CHP technologies.

Energy modelling has a crucial underpinning role for policy making, but the modelling–policy interface faces several limitations. A reinvention of this interface would better provide timely, targeted, tested, transparent and iterated insights from such complex multidisciplinary tools.

Abstract Baselines are generally accepted as a key input assumption in long-term energy modelling, but energy models have traditionally been poor on identifying baselines assumptions. Notably, transparency on the current policy content of model baselines is now especially critical as long-term climate mitigation policies have been underway for a number of years. This paper argues that the range of existing energy and emissions policies are an integral part of any long-term baseline, and hence already represent a “with-policy” baseline, termed here a Business-as-Unusual (BAuU). Crucially, existing energy policies are not a sunk effort; as impacts of existing policy initiatives are targeted at future years, they may be revised through iterative policy making, and their quantitative effectiveness requires ex-post verification. To assess the long-term role of existing policies in energy modelling, currently identified UK policies are explicitly stripped out of the UK MARKAL Elastic Demand (MED) optimisation energy system model, to generate a BAuU (with-policy) and a REF (without policy) baseline. In terms of long-term mitigation costs, policy-baseline assumptions are comparable to another key exogenous modelling assumption — that of global fossil fuel prices. Therefore, best practice in energy modelling would be to have both a no-policy reference baseline, and a current policy reference baseline (BAuU). At a minimum, energy modelling studies should have a transparent assessment of the current policy contained within the baseline. Clearly identifying and comparing policy-baseline assumptions are required for cost effective and objective policy making, otherwise energy models will underestimate the true cost of long-term emissions reductions.

The UK government has set a groundbreaking target of a 60% reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050. Scenario and modelling assessment of this stringent target consistently finds that all sectors need to contribute to emissions reductions. The UK residential sector accounts for around 30% of the total final energy use and more than one-quarter of CO2 emissions. This paper focuses on modelling of the residential sector in a system wide energy-economy models (UK MARKAL) and key UK sectoral housing stock models. The UK residential energy demand and CO2 emission from the both approaches are compared. In an energy system with 60% economy-wide CO2 reductions, the residential sector plays a commensurate role. Energy systems analysis finds this reduction is primarily driven by energy systems interactions notably decarbonisation of the power sector combined with increased appliance efficiency. The stock models find alternate decarbonisation pathways based on assumptions related to the future building stock and behavioural changes. The paper concludes with a discussion on the assumptions and drivers of emission reductions in different models of the residential energy sector. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.