The economics of decarbonizing the energy system—results and insights from the RECIPE model intercomparison

Gunnar Luderer (), Valentina Bosetti, Michael Jakob (), Marian Leimbach (), Jan Steckel, Henri Waisman () and Ottmar Edenhofer

Climatic Change, 2012, vol. 114, issue 1, 9-37

Abstract: This paper synthesizes the results from the model intercomparison exercise among regionalized global energy-economy models conducted in the context of the RECIPE project. The economic adjustment effects of long-term climate policy are investigated based on the cross-comparison of the intertemporal optimization models ReMIND-R and WITCH as well as the recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model IMACLIM-R. A number of robust findings emerge. If the international community takes immediate action to mitigate climate change, the costs of stabilizing atmospheric CO 2 concentrations at 450 ppm (roughly 530–550 ppm-e) discounted at 3% are estimated to be 1.4% or lower of global consumption over the twenty-first century. Second best settings with either a delay in climate policy or restrictions to the deployment of low-carbon technologies can result in substantial increases of mitigation costs. A delay of global climate policy until 2030 would render the 450 ppm target unachievable. Renewables and CCS are found to be the most critical mitigation technologies, and all models project a rapid switch of investments away from freely emitting energy conversion technologies towards renewables, CCS and nuclear. Concerning end use sectors, the models consistently show an almost full scale decarbonization of the electricity sector by the middle of the twenty-first century, while the decarbonization of non-electric energy demand, in particular in the transport sector remains incomplete in all mitigation scenarios. The results suggest that assumptions about low-carbon alternatives for non-electric energy demand are of key importance for the costs and achievability of very low stabilization scenarios. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (73)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-011-0105-x (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:spr:climat:v:114:y:2012:i:1:p:9-37

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-011-0105-x

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().