Energy, Transportation, Environment Department Publications

Anticipating Global Energy, Climate and Policy in 2055: Constructing Qualitative and Quantitative Narratives

This study presents a set of novel and multidisciplinary scenarios (‘narratives’) that provide insight into four distinct and diverging yet plausible worlds. They combine qualitative and quantitative elements in order to reflect the interlinked and complex nature of energy and climate. We use the STEMPLE+ framework to include social, technological, economic, military (security), political, environmental, ...

Simulating the Potential of Swarm Grids for Pre-Electrified Communities: A Case Study from Yemen

Swarm grids are an emerging approach to electrification in the Global South that interconnects individual household generation and storage to a small electricity network to make full use of existing generation capacities. Using a simulation tool for demand, weather, and power flows, we analyse the potential of an AC swarm grid for a large pre-electrified village in rural Yemen. Service quality and ...

The Impact of Policy Measures on Future Power Generation Portfolio and Infrastructure: a Combined Electricity and CCTS Investment and Dispatch Model (ELCO)

This paper presents a general electricity-CO2 modeling framework that is able to simulate interactions of the energy-only market with different forms of national policy measures. We set up a two sector model where players can invest into various types of generation technologies including renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture, transport, and storage (CCTS). For a detailed representation of CCTS ...

Ohne Plan: Wirtschaftsentwicklung und Wirtschaftspolitik in Ungarn

Testing Supply-Side Climate Policies for the Global Steam Coal Market—Can They Curb Coal Consumption?

The achieved international consensus on the 1.5–2 °C target entails that most of current fossil fuel reserves must remain unburned. A major contribution has to come from coal as both the most abundant and the most emission-intensive fuel. Currently, a majority of climate policies aiming at reducing coal consumption are directed towards the demand side. In the absence of a global carbon-pricing regime, ...

Coal Taxes as Supply-Side Climate Policy: a Rationale for Major Exporters?

The shift away from coal is at the heart of the global low-carbon transition. Can governments of coal-producing countries help facilitate this transition and benefit from it? This paper analyses the case for coal taxes as supply-side climate policy implemented by large coal exporting countries. Coal taxes can reduce global carbon dioxide emissions and benefit coal-rich countries through improved terms-of-trade ...

Hydrothermal Carbonization (HTC) of Green Waste: Mitigation Potentials, Costs, and Policy Implications of HTC Coal in the Metropolitan Region of Berlin, Germany

We quantify the greenhouse-gas mitigation potential and carbon abatement costs if green waste in the metropolitan region of Berlin, Germany, is diverted from composting into the production of hydrothermally carbonized coal (HTC coal) that is used to substitute for hard coal in electricity and heat generation. Depending on the origin of the green waste, we specify an urban, a rural-urban, and a rural ...

Workshop 2 Report: Competitive Tendering and Other Forms of Contracting-Out: Institutional Design and Performance Measurement

Consideration of contracting-out has been a mainstay of Thredbo conferences past, accounting for over half of conference papers. This workshop showed that contracting-out remains an important and vibrant theme, with 32 papers and some 50 participants from 20 countries. Case studies of contracting-out (and variants thereof) were presented at the national level for both bus (21) and rail (6). All stages ...

On the Economics of Electrical Storage for Variable Renewable Energy Sources

The use of renewable energy sources is a major strategy to mitigate climate change. Yet Sinn (2017) argues that excessive electrical storage requirements limit the further expansion of variable wind and solar energy. We question, and alter, strong implicit assumptions of Sinn’s approach and find that storage needs are considerably lower, up to two orders of magnitude. First, we move away from corner ...

A Spatial Electricity Market Model for the Power System: the Kazakhstan Case Study

Kazakhstan envisions a transition towards a green economy in the next decades, which poses an immense challenge as the country's economy and energy system depends heavily on hydrocarbon resources. Here, it lacks inclusive and transparent tools assessing technical, economic, and environmental implications resulting from changes in its electricity system. We present such a tool: our comprehensive techno-economic ...