Energy intensity convergence and its long-run minimum

Johannes Emmerling, Enrica De Cian and Maurizio Malpede

Politica economica, 2022, issue 2, 229-252

Abstract: Projections of energy intensity are important for the assessment of future energy demand, future emission pathways, and the costs of climate policies. We estimate and simulate energy intensity based on a conditional convergence approach, and show how based on the results the long-run minimum of energy intensity attainable can be estimated. We consider education, urbanization, and institutional factors and find them to positively impact energy intensity improvements. We link the estimated econometric models to an iterative projection model, resulting in a finite long-term lower limit of energy intensity of GDP to be around 0.24 MJ/$[2005, PPP] at the global level in most SSPs. Yet, by 2100, we estimated that energy intensity below one is hard to achieve based on historical patterns. By 2100, the projected energy intensities are in the range of 1-3 MJ/$[2005, PPP] at the global level. These results show that scenarios such as the ones used in the SR15 can be rationalized based on empirically founded projections, and that in particular the very low energy demand scenarios can be considered feasible on empirical grounds. Only if we include autonomous efficiency improvement through a time trend (around 0.2%/year), the long-term limit of energy intensity approaches zero, indicating the important role of technological process.

Keywords: energy intensity; energy demand; convergence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1429/104375 (application/pdf)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1429/104375 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:mul:je8794:doi:10.1429/104375:y:2022:i:2:p:229-252

Access Statistics for this article

Politica economica is currently edited by Giuseppe Marotta

More articles in Politica economica from Società editrice il Mulino
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().