How to decarbonize the transport sector?

Abstract

In our approach transportation decarbonizes later than e.g. power production. Hydrogen becomes the dominant transport fuel during the 2nd half of the century. Electricity dominates if electric car costs go down by more than an extra 40%. This holds even if H 2 infrastructure proves much more costly than assumed today.

Energy technology roll-out for climate change mitigation: A multi-model study for Latin America

“…coal-based power plants) if one desires to seriously control climate change. Here we support the findings by van der Zwaan et al (2013a): if global GHG emissions are going to be reduced substantially, Latin America may need to prepare itself for capacity additions of some renewable energy options in a few decades from now that are not only much larger than what has historically been observed (for any energy technology) in the region itself, but also substantially higher than (or at least as much as) what has materialized in the past in Europe and the US in terms of annual conventional or renewable energy capacity additions. The body of literature on technology expansion rates is likely to grow further over the years to come (for another recent article, with similar conclusions, see e.g.…”

“…We particularly zoom in on electricity generation, as in developing countries (and especially in Latin America), this sector is likely to grow fast over the decades to come, with a two-to three-fold expansion between today and 2050 (see for example IEA-ETP, 2012. A number of recent studies have shown that the decarbonization of non-electric energy supply, such as in the transport sector and industry, poses crucial challenges for low atmospheric CO 2 concentration stabilization, since either fewer technology options exist or low-carbon technologies abound but are more expensive than for electricity generation (see e.g., Krey et al, 2014;Kriegler et al, 2014aKriegler et al, , 2014bLuderer et al, 2012;Rösler et al, 2014;van der Zwaan et al, 2013a). A detailed inspection of these other sectors, however, is beyond the scope of the present paper.…”

“…CO 2 storage options); et cetera (see also van der Zwaan et al, 2013b). For detailed model descriptions we refer to publications by their respective modeling teams: EPPA (Paltsev et al, 2005); GCAM Phoenix (Sue Wing et al, 2011); POLES (Criqui et al, in press;Kitous et al, 2010); TIAM-ECN van der Zwaan et al, 2013a) and TIAM-WORLD (Loulou, 2008;Loulou and Labriet, 2008).…”

“…Wilson et al (2012) investigate whether climate policy scenarios for future capacity growth of new energy technologies are consistent with historical evidence and find that future required low-carbon technological growth in the power sector appears to be conservative relative to what has been evidenced historically. Differently from them, and probably because they use a different analysis framework (expressing their findings in terms of speed-based technology diffusion variables), van der Zwaan et al (2013a) find that needed average annual capacity additions for a couple of low-carbon energy technologies (solar and wind power) are the opposite of conservative in historic terms, that is, they are several times higher than the maximum average annual capacity additions rate observed in the past (for e.g. coal-based power plants) if one desires to seriously control climate change.…”

Comparison and interactions between the long-term pursuit of energy independence and climate policies

“…With regard to climate change mitigation measures, the model covers reduction options for the three main greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), for both energy and non-energy related emission sources. More detailed model descriptions and further examples of the application of TIAM-ECN can be found in [28][29][30][31] , as well as the references therein. As an energy system model, TIAM-ECN allows analysis of greenhouse gas reduction pathways over the whole energy supply chain up to end-use energy demand.…”