Governments worldwide have agreed that international climate policy should aim to limit the increase of global mean temperature to less than 2°C with respect to pre-industrial levels. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the emission reductions and related energy system changes in various...

Transportation accounts for a substantial share of CO2 emissions, and decarbonizing transport will be necessary to limit global warming to below 2°C. Due to persistent reliance on fossil fuels, it is posited that transport is more difficult to decarbonize than other sectors. We test this...

While the international community has agreed on the long-term target of limiting global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, only a few concrete climate policies and measures to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been implemented. We use a set of three global...

The climate targets defined under the Paris agreement of limiting global temperature increase below 1.5 or 2°C require massive deployment of low-carbon options in the energy mix, which is currently dominated by fossil fuels. Scenarios suggest that Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) might play a...

This paper describes the WITCH - World Induced Technical Change Hybrid - model in its structure, calibration, and the implementation of the SSP/RCP scenario implementation. The WITCH model is a regionally disaggregated hard-linked model based on a Ramsey type optimal growth model and a detailed...

This paper analyzes a set of new scenarios for energy markets in Europe to evaluate the consistency of economic incentives and climate objectives. It focuses in particular on the role of natural gas across a range of climate policy scenarios (including the Copenhagen Pledges and the EU Roadmap)...

This paper uses an integrated assessment model to quantify the climate R&D investment strategy for a variety of scenarios fully consistent with 2°C. We estimate the total climate R&D investment needs in approximately 1 USD Trillion cumulatively in the period 2010-2030, and 1.6 USD Trillions in...

The penetration of Variable Renewable Energies (VREs) in the electricity mix poses serious challenges in terms of management of the electrical grids, as the associated variability and non-dispatchability are in contrast with the requirement that the load be instantaneously equalized by the...

In the present paper we use the output of multiple expert elicitation surveys on the future cost of key low-carbon technologies and use it as input of three Integrated Assessment models, GCAM, MARKAL_US and WITCH. By means of a large set of simulations we aim to assess the implications of these...

The availability of technology plays a major role in the feasibility and costs of climate policy. Nonetheless, technological change is highly uncertain and capital intensive, requiring risky efforts in research and development of clean energy technologies. In this paper, we introduce a two-track...