Would Climate Policy Improve the European Energy Security?

Abstract

International audienceEnergy security improvement is often presented as a co-benefit of climate policies. This paper evaluates this claim. It investigates whether climate policy would improve energy security, while accounting for the difficulties entailed by the many-faceted nature of the concept and the large uncertainties on the determinants of future energy systems. A multi-dimension analysis grid is used to capture the energy security concept, and a database of scenarios allows us to explore the uncertainty space. The results, focusing on Europe, reveal there is no unequivocal effect of climate policy on all the perspectives of energy security. Moreover, time significantly matters: the impact of climate policies is mixed in the short term and globally good in the medium term. In the long term, there is a risk of degradation of the energy security. Lastly, we examine the robustness of our results to uncertainties on drivers of economic growth, availability of fossil fuels and the potentials and low-carbon technologies, and find that they are sensitive mainly to fossil fuels availability, low carbon technologies in the energy sector and improvements in energy efficiency

Energy security and renewable energy deployment in the EU: Liaisons Dangereuses or Virtuous Circle?

“…Therefore, the non-inclusion of other factors may distort significantly the results and lead to biased conclusions. This result accords more with a modern approach to energy security without a prejudice against energy dependence [25,27]. Finally, our fourth conclusion is that an energy security definition primarily based on the disruption of energy supplies due to physical interruptions (accessibility dimension) constitutes a reductionism and implies a lack of coherence among the different EU's energy policy dimensions.…”

“…The role of RES within the relationship between energy security and climate change policies has recently been the subject of heated discussion [1,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Currently, there is no agreement on whether a complementarity or a trade-off exists between these two dimensions [22][23][24][25][26]. In order to conceptualize this relationship some theoretical frameworks have been constructed.…”

“…The current academic debate on the use of RES and energy security issues is dominated by studies on economic modelling of RES deployment [23,25,34], their role in possible future energy systems [35][36][37], their optimal contribution in energy supply portfolio [38][39][40][41][42] and, more recently, their geopolitical implications [43]. Regarding the empirical evidence, the literature stresses the importance of policy interventions [5,44,45] and market liberalization [5,46,47].…”

Identifying trade-offs and co-benefits of climate policies in China to align policies with SDGs and achieve the 2 °C goal

“…Climate policy affects various SDG-related sectors, such as energy security [3,4], air quality [5,6], human health [7,8], land management [9,10], food security [11][12][13], water scarcity [14,15], and biodiversity [16]. In addition, the timing of climate change mitigation and the implementation of policy instruments can change the multi-sectoral consequences.…”

Identifying the main uncertainty drivers of energy security in a low-carbon world: The case of Europe

“…Several papers recently used this framework to explore the consequences of climate policies for energy security from a long-term perspective Jewell et al, 2013Jewell et al, , 2014Guivarch et al, 2015).…”