Assessing carbon lock-in

By P. Erickson, Sivan Kartha, M. Lazarus, K. Tempest. 2015

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The term ‘carbon lock-in’ refers to the tendency for certain carbon-intensive technological systems to persist over time, ‘locking out’ lower-carbon alternatives, and owing to a combination of linked technical, economic, and institutional factors. These technologies may be costly to build, but relatively inexpensive to operate and, over time, they reinforce political, market, and social factors that make it difficult to move away from, or ‘unlock’ them. As a result, by investing in assets prone to lock-in, planners and investors restrict future flexibility and increase the costs of achieving agreed climate protection goals. Here, we develop a straight-forward approach to assess the speed, strength, and scale of carbon lock-in for major energy-consuming assets in the power, buildings, industry, and transport sectors. We pilot the approach at the global level, finding that carbon lock-in is greatest, globally, for coal power plants, gas power plants, and oil-based vehicles. The approach can be readily applied at the national or regional scale, and may be of particular relevance to policymakers interested in enhancing flexibility in their jurisdictions for deeper emissions cuts in the future, and therefore in limiting the future costs associated with ‘stranded assets’.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3d2385a743d32600b017677fb56d9ba4572ca581

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Citations in the corpus

Varieties of coal-fired power phase-out across Europe (2019, background): “Coal has a huge impact on climate change (Erickson et al., 2015).”
The ‘2°C capital stock’ for electricity generation: Committed cumulative carbon emissions from the electricity generation sector and the transition to a green economy (2016, background): “The problems created by ‘committed’ emissions are also related to the concept of ‘carbon lock-in’, which is defined as ‘‘the tendency for certain carbon-intensive technological systems to persist over time, ‘locking out’ lower-carbon alternatives” [28].”
Overcoming barriers to solar and wind energy adoption in two Asian giants: India and Indonesia (2019, background): “In the context of fossil fuel lock-in (Erickson et al., 2015), the existence of long-term PPAs for coal-fired power stations creates a challenge for the quick rise of renewables.”
Revisiting carbon lock-in in energy systems: Explaining the perpetuation of coal power in Japan (2020, background): “Since these require significant upfront investments, investors have a financial imperative to operate these installations at least until sunk capital is recovered [50,51].”
The political economy of car dependence: A systems of provision approach (2020, background): “the magnitude of the financial and techno-institutional barriers to ‘unlocking’ is greater for road passenger transport than for most other sectors [35].”
Carbon Lock-In: Types, Causes, and Policy Implications (2016, unknown): “Disruptive changes that do emerge in one sphere a whole becoming increasingly resistant to change It is difﬁcult to identify a single starting point for—or single cause of—lock-in.”