Energy market scenarios for evaluating energy efficiency measures in industrial energy systems

Other conference contribution, 2004

Decreasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions will be a major driver when designing or retrofitting industrial process energy systems in the future. Energy system investments often have a long lifetime, thus assessing the economic and climate change impact of such projects is usually difficult, given the fluctuations of fuel and electricity prices. Further uncertainty arises when costs resulting from energy policy instruments aiming at reducing GHG emissions (e.g. CO2 taxes) must be taken into account. The goal of this paper is to transfer knowledge from the field of energy market and energy systems forecasting to the area of industrial energy systems. Based on an analysis of results from a number of energy market forecasting projects, several energy market scenarios are presented that cover a wide range of possible evolutions of the Nordic energy market. The scenarios can then be used to gain a better understanding of the long term economic and climate change consequences of different energy system projects at a given process site. This project was undertaken with the aim of developing tools for evaluating energy system options in the pulp and paper industry, thus particular emphasis is placed on developing pricing models for biofuel.