Advancing methodologies for assessing feasibility and realism in energy transitions

Licentiate thesis, 2024

The global transition away from carbon-intensive fuels such as coal towards low-carbon energy technologies like wind and solar power is critical for mitigating climate change. Despite agreement on its desirability, persistent uncertainties surround the practical speed at which this transition can occur. Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) and energy systems models have significantly advanced our comprehension of how this shift might progress. However, it has been challenging to integrate crucial yet difficult-to-quantify socio-political factors into these models. This limitation has hindered our ability to evaluate the feasibility of the scenarios and pathways generated by these models in real-world contexts.

This licentiate contributes to addressing this gap and develops methods to quantitatively capture the effects of societal and political factors in shaping the growth of solar PV and onshore wind power, and the decline of coal.

Paper 1 develops a new modelling approach for projecting the global growth of solar PV and onshore wind using national-level data. The proposed hybrid model accounts for the dynamic interplay between economic, socio-technical, and political factors shaping technology growth at distinct phases of technology diffusion. We use these projections to create empirically-grounded feasibility zones for the future growth of these technologies until 2040. We find that their most likely range of deployment is in-line with 2°C warming, but substantially lower than scenarios consistent with the Paris agreement. Achieving deployment required to meet the 1.5° C target and the Global Pledge on Renewables would require solar PV and onshore wind in the whole world to scale as fast as in a few leading countries with exceptionally favorable circumstances.

Paper 2 develops an approach to empirically estimate the cost of overcoming socio-political opposition to the phase-out of coal power by collecting data on national schemes to compensate actors negatively affected by the transition. We analyse the relationship between the ambition of coal phase-out pledges and compensation schemes and find that globally, compensation amounts to over USD 200 billion (uncertainty 163-258), of which about half is provided internationally. Extending similar transfers to India and China to phase out coal in line with the Paris temperature targets could make compensation flows larger than all current international climate financing.

Together, they build on emerging work on feasibility spaces for the future deployment of different climate mitigation options, and advance methodologies for quantifying the level of policy effort required to accelerate the energy transition.