Search

The JRC PESETA IV study shows that ecosystems, people and economies in the EU will face major impacts from climate change if we do not urgently mitigate greenhouse gas emissions or adapt to climate change. The burden of climate change shows a clear north-south divide, with southern regions in Europe much more impacted, through the effects of extreme heat, water scarcity, drought, forest fires and agriculture losses. Limiting global warming to well below 2°C would considerably reduce climate change impacts in Europe. Adaptation to climate change would further minimize unavoidable impacts in a cost-effective manner, with considerable co-benefits from nature-based solutions., JRC.C.6-Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transport

El ISBN corresponde a la versión electrónica del documento

PESETA IV assesses the impacts of climate change on electricity production by hydro, wind, solar, nuclear and other thermal power plants, including biomass, coal, gas and oil. We assess these impacts in the present power system and in 2050 for a dynamic scenario in line with 2°C mitigation efforts. Both scenarios show that, at EU-level, the production of hydropower plants increases with global warming thanks to higher water availability (although this does not imply substantial development of new hydro plants), while nuclear power decreases. However, there are regional differences in the impacts, such as increased hydro production in the North, and a decline in hydro- and nuclear power production in southern Europe due to lower water availability for direct production or for cooling river-based plants. In northern Europe, the increasing availability of cheaper hydro results in substitution effects and lower production costs, while in southern Europe production costs could increase. Based on the modelling methodology used and the latest available climate simulations, the direct impacts of climate change on wind and solar production are not significant at EU-level. However, in the 2050 power system their capacity would increase in southern regions to compensate for the lost hydro and nuclear production. Climate change impacts on energy in the rest of the world show a negligible spill-over effect on Europe. Improved cooling technologies have the potential to reduce strongly the negative effects of water scarcity, particularly for nuclear plants in southern Europe., JRC.C.6-Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transport

This report analyses global transition pathways to a low Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions economy The main scenarios presented have been designed to be compatible with the 2°C and 1.5°C temperature targets put forward in the UNFCCC Paris Agreement, in order to minimise irreversible climate damages. Reaching these targets requires action from all world countries and in all economic sectors. Global net GHG emissions would have to drop to zero by around 2080 to limit temperature increase to 2°C above pre-industrial levels (by around 2065 for the 1.5°C limit). The analysis shows that this ambitious low-carbon transition can be achieved with robust economic growth, implying small mitigation costs. Results furthermore highlight that the combination of climate and air policies can contribute to improving air quality across the globe, thus enabling progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals for climate action, clean energy and good health. Key uncertainties in future pathways related to the availability of future technological options have been assessed for Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) and bioenergy. If CCS technologies would not develop, a 2°C pathway would have a similar mitigation trajectory in the first half of the century as a 1.5°C scenario with CCS., JRC.C.6-Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transport

This report is a public manual of the POLES-JRC model, the in-house tool of the European Commission for global and long-term analysis of GHG mitigation policies and evolution of energy markets. The model includes a comprehensive description of the energy system and related GHG emissions for a large set of significant economies and residual regions, covering the World and including international bunkers. Through linkage with specialized tools it also provides a full coverage of GHG emissions, including from land use and agriculture, as well as of air pollutants emissions. The POLES-JRC model builds on years of development of the POLES model (Prospective Outlook on Long-term Energy Systems) while adding specific features developed internally to the JRC. Latest modelling upgrades - compared to the 2017 edition of the model documentation - include final energy demand, electricity production, the role of hydrogen as an energy vector, the oil, gas and coal international markets and GHG emission projections. This document presents the Prospective Outlook on Long-term Energy Systems (POLES) model of the Joint Research Centre, as used in the 2018 edition of the Global Energy and Climate Outlook (GECO)., JRC.C.6-Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transport

The study assesses how climate change could affect Europe in eleven impact areas. Under a high warming scenario, several climate impacts show a clear geographical north-south divide. Most of the welfare losses, assessed for six impact areas, would be greatly reduced under a 2ᵒC scenario., JRC.C.6-Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transport

A Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM) is likely to have significant impacts on our economy and society. It is expected that CCAM unveils new and unprecedented mobility opportunities that hold the potential to unlock a range of safety, environmental and efficiency benefits. At the same time, it is anticipated that it will bring deep changes in the labour market, progressively making some occupations and skills less relevant, while at the same time opening up new opportunities for different businesses and requiring new and more advanced skills. With Europe accounting for 23% of global motor vehicle production (Acea Statistics, 2016) and almost 72% of inland freight transported by road in Europe (European Commission, 2017a), the full deployment of Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) technologies is expected to have a substantial impact on the European economy. The economic impacts of CAVs will go far beyond the automotive industry, into sectors like insurance, maintenance and repair or health, among others. While it is clear that CAVs could offer unique opportunities for value creation, it is also essential to acknowledge that they might imply a substantial transformation of our industries and our social and living systems. The study is aimed at analysing the value at stake for both industry and society as a result of a transition towards a CCAM mobility in Europe. It aims at identifying the economic sectors that are most likely to be affected by CCAM as well as the influencing factors driving future changes in each sector. The ultimate goal is to estimate ranges of potential effects for the main affected sectors, with the support of a set of scenarios. The study also aims at analysing the potential effects of CCAM on the workforce and pursues the identification of skills that need to be addressed in the mobility transition. The focus of the study is exclusively paid on road transport and covers both passenger and freight transport., JRC.C.4-Sustainable Transport

The current development of wind and solar power sources calls for an improvement of longtermenergy models. Indeed, high shares of variable wind and solar productions have shortandlong-term impacts on the power system, requiring the development of flexibility options:fast-reacting power plants, demand response, grid enhancement or electricity storage. Ourfirst main contribution is the modelling of electricity storage and grid expansion in the POLESmodel (Prospective Outlook on Long-term Energy Systems). We set up new investmentmechanisms, where storage development is based on several combined economic values.After categorising the long-term energy models and the power sector modelling tools in acommon typology, we showed the need for a better integration of both approaches.Therefore, the second major contribution of our work is the yearly coupling of POLES to ashort-term optimisation of the power sector operation, with the European Unit CommitmentAnd Dispatch model (EUCAD). The two-way data exchange allows the long-term coherentscenarios of POLES to be directly backed by the short-term technical detail of EUCAD. Ourresults forecast a strong and rather quick development of the cheapest flexibility options: gridinterconnections, pumped hydro storage and demand response programs, including electricvehicle charging optimisation and vehicle-to-grid storage. The more expensive batterystorage presumably finds enough system value in the second half of the century. A sensitivityanalysis shows that improving the fixed costs of batteries impacts more the investments thanimproving their efficiency. We also show the explicit dependency between storage andvariable renewable energy sources., Le développement des énergies renouvelables éolienne et solaire implique de repenser les modèles à long terme du système énergétique. En effet, les impacts à court et long terme des productions intermittentes éolienne et solaire sur le système électrique entraînent un besoin de flexibilité : centrales de production très réactives, gestion de la demande,amélioration du réseau électrique ou stockage d’électricité. Le premier apport majeur à l’état de l’art est l’ajout du stockage d’électricité et du réseau électrique européen dans le modèle POLES (Prospective Outlook on Long-term Energy Systems). Un nouveau mécanisme d’investissement a été développé, mieux adapté aux enjeux des renouvelables ; il inclut plusieurs valeurs économiques du stockage. D’autre part, une nouvelle typologie applicable à la fois aux modèles de prospective énergétique et aux outils détaillés du secteur électrique,a montré l’intérêt de rassembler ces deux approches. Ainsi, la deuxième contribution principale est le couplage annuel de POLES à un modèle d’opération du système électrique,EUCAD (European Unit Commitment And Dispatch), qui optimise l’allocation technico économique des centrales européennes de production et de stockage. Les échanges bidirectionnels d’informations permettent de bénéficier à la fois de la cohérence à long terme des scénarios économiques de POLES et du détail technique d’EUCAD. Un scénario conservateur prévoit un développement rapide des options de flexibilité les moins chères :interconnexions, stockage hydraulique et gestion de la demande – que ce soit par des effacements de consommation ou par l’optimisation de la charge et décharge des batteries de véhicules électriques. Les batteries stationnaires, plus chères, sont développées en seconde partie de siècle. Leur développement pourrait être accéléré par une réduction des coûts fixes du stockage plus efficace qu’une amélioration du rendement. Les liens explicites entre renouvelables intermittents et stockage d’électricité ressortent aussi des résultats.

Climate change in Europe leads to a decrease of residential heating needs and an increase of residential cooling needs. The impact on cooling needs is higher than on heating, in each of the climatic European regions. The overall residential heating and cooling needs are expected to decrease by a quarter by the end of the century, due to climate change. This order of magnitude remains when accounting for a higher insulation level of buildings., JRC.C.6-Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transport

This report is a public manual of the POLES-JRC model, the in-house tool of the European Commission for global and long-term analysis of GHG mitigation policies and evolution of energy markets. The model includes a comprehensive description of the energy system and related GHG emissions for a large set of significant economies and residual regions, covering the World and including international bunkers. Through linkage with specialized tools it also provides a full coverage of GHG emissions, including from land use and agriculture, as well as of air pollutants emissions. The POLES-JRC model builds on years of development of the POLES model while adding specific features developed internally to the JRC. The model version presented in this report is used in particular to produce the JRC Global Energy and Climate Outlook (GECO) series., JRC.C.6-Economics of Climate Change, Energy and Transport

37 p.; Renewable sources of electricity production are strongly increasing in many parts of the world. The production costs are going down quickly, thus accelerating the deployment of new solar and wind electricity generation. In the long-term, these variable sources of electricity could represent a high share of the power system. However, long-term foresight energy models have difficulties describing precisely the integration challenges of Variable Renewable Energy Sources (VRES) such as wind or solar. They just do not represent the short-term technical constraints of the power sector. The objective of this paper is to show a new approach of the representation of the challenges of variability in the long-term foresight energy model POLES (Prospective Outlook on Long-term Energy Systems). We develop a short-term optimization model for the power sector operation, EUCAD (European Unit Commitment And Dispatch) and we couple it to POLES year after year. The direct coupling, with bi-directional exchanges of information, brings technical precision to the long-term coherence of energy scenarios.

International audience; Energy systems are changing worldwide: new energy policies promote more sustainable energy productions, including Variable Renewable Energy sources (VREs) such as wind or solar. The long-term implications of the variability and relative unpredictability of these non dispatchable energy sources need to be assessed, for example with energy scenarios. Indeed, electricity is not a homogeneous good: its value depends on the time, space and how variable a production is. Long-term energy models are used, VREs integration challenges being a hot topic in energy modelling. An assessment of long-term energy models is necessary to understand how they represent the specific constraints of VREs on the rest of the power system. Therefore a new typology is proposed for comparing both long-term energy models and power sector models. This comparison shows that – despite all the recent modelling efforts – no long-term energy model represents in detail all the impacts of VREs on the power sector. For example, the sequential representation of the electricity storage operation is too precise for many long-term models. Therefore we develop a dedicated new power sector module, EUCAD (European Unit Commitment And Dispatch). The particularity of the work is that it is connected to POLES (Prospective Outlook on Long-term Energy Systems), one of the most technology-detailed long-term energy models. We present the first results of this new detailed electricity module.

International audience; Energy systems are changing worldwide, and particularly in Europe, where energy policies promote a more sustainable energy production. Variable Renewable Energy sources (VRE) such as wind or solar are benefiting from these policies, but the long term implications need to be anticipated, through energy scenarios. Long term energy models are used, and VRE integration challenges are a hot topic in energy modelling. An assessment of long term energy models is necessary to understand how they represent the specific constraints of VRE on the rest of the power system. Therefore a new typology is proposed for comparing both long term energy models and power sector models. This comparison shows that, despite all the recent modelling efforts, no long term energy model represents in detail the power sector, with all the impacts of VRE. For example, there is no real representation of the electricity storage operation. Therefore we develop a new power sector module for POLES (Prospective Outlook on Long-term Energy Systems), one of the most technology-detailed long term energy models. We present the first results of this new detailed electricity module.

International audience