Looking under the hood: A comparison of techno-economic assumptions across national and global integrated assessment models

By Volker Krey, Fei Guo, Peter Kolp, Wenji Zhou, Robert Schaeffer, Aayushi Awasthy, C. Bertram, H. D. de Boer, P. Fragkos, Shinichiro Fujimori and 22 more. Energy, 2019

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Integrated assessment models are extensively used in the analysis of climate change mitigation and are informing national decision makers as well as contribute to international scientific assessments. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of techno-economic assumptions in the electricity sector among fifteen different global and national integrated assessment models. Particular focus is given to six major economies in the world: Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan and the US. The comparison reveals that techno-economic characteristics are quite different across integrated assessment models, both for the base year and future years. It is, however, important to recognize that techno-economic assessments from the literature exhibit an equally large range of parameters as the integrated assessment models reviewed. Beyond numerical differences, the representation of technologies also differs among models, which needs to be taken into account when comparing numerical parameters. While desirable, it seems difficult to fully harmonize techno-economic parameters across a broader range of models due to structural differences in the representation of technology. Therefore, making techno-economic parameters available in the future, together with of the technology representation as well as the exact definitions of the parameters should become the standard approach as it allows an open discussion of appropriate assumptions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e6c2017fbda169e8777c1d399cf62c30ee2c0ad6

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Citations in the corpus

On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research (2022, background): “has produced quite slow RE uptake [298], [299].”
A Review of Criticisms of Integrated Assessment Models and Proposed Approaches to Address These, through the Lens of BECCS (2019, background): “Furthermore, a recent paper includes specific details of some of the power sector technology costs included in the models, along with comparisons to cost projections from organisations such as the International Energy Agency [33].”
A multi-model assessment of food security implications of climate change mitigation (2019, unknown): “47 48 Acknowledgement; 49 SFu, TH, and KT are supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP16K18177, JSPS 50 Overseas Research Fellowships, and the Environment Research and Technology 51 Development Fund (2-1702) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of 52 Japan.”