Reducing Biomass Utilization in the Ethiopia Energy System: A National Modeling Analysis

Zulfikar Yurnaidi and Suduk Kim
Additional contact information
Zulfikar Yurnaidi: Department of Energy Systems Research, Ajou University, Suwon 16499, Korea
Suduk Kim: Department of Energy Systems Research, Ajou University, Suwon 16499, Korea

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 7, 1-17

Abstract: With its target of becoming a middle-income country by 2025, Ethiopia has set ambitious targets in its Growth Transformation Plan (GTP) II, such as increasing power generation capacity from 4.18 to 17.21 GW during the 2016–2020 period. However, according to the 2015 IEA energy balance table, Ethiopia depends heavily on biomass for its final energy use. In final energy service sectors, biomass takes more than 90% of the final energy consumption (36.9 out of 40.9 MTOE), 99% of which is consumed in the residential sector. Therefore, it is very important to achieve biomass utilization in the energy sector targets of Ethiopia. This paper aims to analyze the biomass consumption in the Ethiopia energy system, and discuss related policies. An integrated assessment model is chosen for its national energy modeling, and to simulate policy scenarios in a comprehensive and consistent manner. After building a reference case, three scenarios are developed: (1) higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and urbanization rate, (2) efficiency improvement of biomass technologies, and (3) sensitivity analysis of urbanization. It is found that biomass still holds the largest share of energy consumption in the future, which increases even more in the high GDP and urbanization scenario. Increasing efficiency of biomass technology can reduce biomass consumption, but the “rebound effect” is observed, which increases the energy service demand, thus dampening the effect of biomass efficiency improvement.

Keywords: national energy modeling; biomass; Ethiopia; urban rural; efficiency; urbanization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/7/1745/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/7/1745/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:11:y:2018:i:7:p:1745-:d:155993

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().