Lukas Kranzl

Economic Evaluation of Climate Change Impacts

Executive Summary.- Introduction.- Part I: Cost on Opportunities of Climate Change at the European Level.- Part II: Evaluation at the National Level: Methodological Issues.- Part III: Fields of Impact.- Part IV: Aggregate Evaluation.

Medium and Long-Term Perspectives of International Bioenergy Trade

In the coming decades, huge challenges in the global energy system are expected. Scenarios indicate that bioenergy will play a substantial role in this process. However, up to now there is very limited insight regarding the implication this may have on bioenergy trade in the long term. The objectives of this chapter are: (1) to assess how bioenergy trade is included in different energy sector models and (2) to discuss the implications and perspectives of bioenergy trade in different energy scenarios. We grouped scenarios from the models IMAGE/TIMER, POLES and GFPM according to their policy targets and increase of bioenergy use in “ambitious” and “moderate” bioenergy scenarios and compared results regarding bioenergy trade for solid and liquid biomass. Trade balances for various world regions vary significantly in the different models and scenarios. Nevertheless, a few robust trends and results can be derived up to the year 2050: Russia and former USSR countries could turn into strong biomass exporting countries. Moreover, Canada, South-America, Central and Rest-Africa as well as Oceania could cover another substantial part of the bioenergy supply. As importing countries, India, Western Europe and China might play a key role. The results show (1) the high relevance of the topic, (2) the high uncertainties, (3) the need to better integrate social, ecological, economic and logistical barriers and restrictions into the models and (4) the need to better understand the potential role of bioenergy trade for a sustainable, low-carbon future energy system.

Shared-Socio-Economic Pathways

Socio-economic pathways determine future climate impacts and costs thereof. Pragmatically, we have referred to a global reference socio-economic pathway (represented by SSP2 in the IPCC process) and derived figures for the core economic, demographic, land-use and (qualitatively) technological development in Austria, which again frame the sectoral development assumptions necessary to follow a scenario-based cost assessment approach.

Cross-country analysis of the implementation of nearly zero-energy building standards across Europe

Sustainability of the European society and economy will be based on renewable energy and resource efficiency. This implies among others the large scale deployment of nearly Zero-Energy Buildings. The technology is already available and proven; however the large scale uptake of nearly zero-energy building construction and renovation is a big challenge for all market actors. A substantial gap in reliable data on current market activities makes it difficult for policy-makers to evaluate the success of their policies as the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive requires the EU-Member States to define nearly zero-energy building standards for new buildings and energy efficiency requirements for building renovation. Thus, the subject of this paper is to show the implications of a current policy scenario until 2050 in terms of the quality of the building stock, the related final energy demand and finally the associated investments and costs in four selected countries, namely Italy, Norway, Romania and Spain. As the results show there is a high potential for energy savings by 2050, which is partly lost due to the lack of strong building standards as assumed in the current policy scenario.

Buildings: Heating and Cooling

While energy savings in buildings is among the key prerequisites for a low-carbon future, our ability to maintain temperatures in buildings within a specific comfort range, and thus our demand for heating and cooling energy, are also highly sensitive to climate change. We quantify two main impact chains: (1) a higher temperature in winter leads to a reduction of heating energy demand and (2) a higher temperature in summer leads to an increase in demand for cooling. The demand for cooling energy depends largely on the future uptake of air conditioning in the building sector and is subject to considerable uncertainty. On quantifying these two impacts for the example of Austria for the period around 2050 a net saving of about 230 million euros per year is found, triggering slightly positive effects on welfare and GDP. The result is depending on the development of energy prices and in particular by the ratio of electricity to fuel price in the heating sector. The results show that, in absolute terms, the energy reduction in heating is much higher than the increased energy demand for cooling for the time horizon and the geographical location investigated. This stems from the fact that energy demand for air conditioning in Austria in 2008 was only 0.4–0.5 % of the final energy demand for heating. The impacts and costs resulting from a strong increase in electricity peak loads in summer are investigated in Chap. 14 (Electricity).