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Climate change can strongly affect renewable energy production. The state of the art in projecting future renewable energy generation has focused on using regional climate prediction. However, regional climate prediction is characterized by inherent uncertainty due to the complexity of climate models. This work provides a comprehensive study to quantify the impact of climate uncertainties in projecting future renewable energy potential over five climate zones of Europe. Thirteen future climate scenarios, including five global climate models (GCMs) and three representative concentration pathways (RCPs), are downscaled by the RCA4 regional climate model (RCM) over 90 years (2010-2099), divided into three 30-year periods. Solar and wind energy production is projected considering short-/long-term climate variations and uncertainties in seven representative cities (Narvik, Gothenburg, Munich, Antwerp, Salzburg, Valencia, and Athens). The results showed that the uncertainty caused by GCMs has the most substantial impact on projecting renewable energy generation. The variations due to GCM selection can become even larger than long-term climate change variations over time. Climate change uncertainties lead to over 23% and 45% projection differences for solar PV and wind energy potential, respectively. While the signal of climate change in solar radiation is weak between scenarios and over time, wind energy generation is affected by 25%.

This paper presents the potentials and costs of synthetic fuels (synfuels) produced by renewable energy via PEM water electrolysis and the subsequent Fischer-Tropsch process for the years 2020, 2030, 2040, and 2050 in selected countries across the globe. The renewable energy potential was determined by the open-source tool pyGRETA and includes photovoltaic, onshore wind, and biomass. Carbon dioxide is obtained from biomass and the atmosphere by direct air capture. The potentials and costs were determined by aggregating minimal cost energy systems for each location on a state level. Each linear energy system was modelled and optimised by the optimisation framework urbs. The analysis focused on decentralised and off-grid synthetic fuels’ production. The transportation costs were roughly estimated based on the distance to the nearest maritime port for export. The distribution infrastructure was not considered since the already-existing infrastructure for fossil fuels can be easily adopted. The results showed that large amounts of synthetic fuels are available for EUR 110/MWh (USD 203/bbl) mainly in Africa, Central and South America, as well as Australia for 2050. This corresponds to a cost reduction of more than half compared to EUR 250/MWh (USD 461/bbl) in 2020. The synfuels’ potentials follow the photovoltaic potentials because of the corresponding low levelised cost of electricity. Batteries are in particular used for photovoltaic-dominant locations, and transportation costs are low compared to production costs., German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

This study explores the critical notion of how feasible it is to achieve long-term mitigation goals to limit global temperature change. It uses a model inter-comparison of three integrated assessment models (TIAM-Grantham, MESSAGE-GLOBIOM and WITCH) harmonized for socio-economic growth drivers using one of the new shared socio-economic pathways (SSP2), to analyse multiple mitigation scenarios aimed at different temperature changes in 2100, in order to assess the model outputs against a range of indicators developed so as to systematically compare the feasibility across scenarios. These indicators include mitigation costs and carbon prices, rates of emissions reductions and energy efficiency improvements, rates of deployment of key low-carbon technologies, reliance on negative emissions, and stranding of power generation assets. The results highlight how much more challenging the 2 °C goal is, when compared to the 2.5–4 °C goals, across virtually all measures of feasibility. Any delay in mitigation or limitation in technology options also renders the 2 °C goal much less feasible across the economic and technical dimensions explored. Finally, a sensitivity analysis indicates that aiming for less than 2 °C is even less plausible, with significantly higher mitigation costs and faster carbon price increases, significantly faster decarbonization and zero-carbon technology deployment rates, earlier occurrence of very significant carbon capture and earlier onset of global net negative emissions. Such a systematic analysis allows a more in-depth consideration of what realistic level of long-term temperature changes can be achieved and what adaptation strategies are therefore required.

The core objective of this paper is to analyze the energy and CO2 reduction potentials as well as the market prospects of biofuels in EU-15 in a dynamic framework till 2050. The most important result of this analysis is that 2nd generation biofuels might become economically competitive between 2020 and 2030, yet this can only be achieved if the following preconditions are fulfilled: (1) achievement of significant learning effects leading to considerably lower plant costs, (2) significant improvement of conversion efficiency from feedstock to fuel leading to lower feedstock costs and better ecological performance, (3) increases in conventional diesel and gasoline prices, e.g., due to CO2 based taxes.