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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EUCalc (EU Calculator: trade-offs and pathways towards sustainable and low-carbon European Societies)

Teaser

Summary

The EUCalc project will deliver an urgently needed comprehensive framework for research, business, and public sector decision makers which identifies and enables an appraisal of synergies and trade-offs of feasible European decarbonisation pathways. EUCalc explores the impact of the choices that can be made in different sectors, including power and heat generation, transport, industry, buildings, agriculture, and food and of the underlying lifestyle choices of Europeâ€™s citizens in terms of the climatological, societal, and economic consequences. For politicians and policy makers at the European and member state levels, stakeholders and innovators, EUCalc will provide a Transitions Pathways Explorer, which can be used as a concrete planning tool for reconciling the urgent need for technological and societal change, against the associated inertia and lock-in effects. The EU Calculator covers a broad variety of sectors, i.e. it is able to support sectoral decision making as it immediately shows trade-off and synergies in regard to emission savings and in terms of sectoral transformation decisions being taken. The modeling approach and the associated Transition Pathways Explorer are trans-disciplinarily designed for accuracy, transparency, speed and accessibility. Since the time dynamics for sectoral approaches are represented as stylized future scenarios in the model, users can immediately grasp the consequences of their changes made in policy ambitions and which they may have in terms of GHG emissions, climate impacts, employment, or resource use. This approach uncloses the full option space of viable decarbonisation pathways instead of only showing the futures that are imaginable within the present economic realities. It may, thus, help to re-establish the supremacy of politics over economic constraints. Despite the inherent challenges of developing a new model that is, at the same time, scientifically sound and easy to use by non-experts, the completed project work to date has contributed to fulfil the project objectives, namely:

Fix new conceptual challenges like coupling a formal economic model featuring inter-sectoral input-output and international trade linkages with sectoral-level modules covering individual EU member states + Switzerland.

Incorporate a mechanism via the climate module to account for the fact that climate impacts in Europe depend also on decisions taken elsewhere in the Rest of the World.

Provide a much richer spatial detail of inputs in which all of the 28 member states + Switzerland are individually accounted.

Account for age class and gender distributions during the quantification of particular lifestyle levers, in opposition to simply employing country averages.

Develop a highly granular agricultural/land module in order to not disregard the many interactions land has with sectors like lifestyles, energy, water and biodiversity.

Work performed

The main ingredient of the EUCalc project is to develop levers as alternative to actual modelling approaches. Levers are stylized future sector scenarios based on modeling on expert guess, literature reviews and modeling exercises. For each sector four different ambition levels have been defined in order to offer users a suitable variety of options for policy making. Therefore, in the first 18 months work packages 1 to 5 have derived a first set of levers for the sectors covering Lifestyles; Buildings; Transport; Production & Manufacturing; Land, Water & Biodiversity; Electricity & Fossil Fuels, etc.. Considering actual debates in the societal-energy model community and stakeholder needs the number of levers has been condensed in order to be manageable by users of the planned Transition Pathways Explorer. Moreover, the consortium has come to an agreement on how to understand and align the ambition levels for each lever. On this basis, ambition level descriptions and their time development have been defined. As not all expert consultations have been performed, ambition levels and lever definitions itself still show different maturity levels. Overall, the EUCalc consortium took a stepwise approach to develop the model, i.e. it started with a so-called core model, which is successively extended due the course of the project. Moreover, as stimulated by the Global Calculator approach, the consortium will add further modules using the European member states as resolution. This will enable users to gather much deeper policy insights than before. For example:

The Climate, Lifestyles & Technological Transitions work package has developed a set of methodologies that take explicitly into account the age (and at larger extent gender) dimensions in the quantification of lifestyle levers for EU28+Switzerland as opposed to country averages.

The Buildings & Transport work package is developing an integration of urbanization effects on floor space uptake and availability of renewable heating and cooling sources.

The raw materials module considers the utilization of material use, where the material characterisation for the different technologies is harmonized across modules including future material shifts.

The Land, Water & Biodiversity work package has implemented a higher granularity in the agriculture module. Additional sub-modules have been developed, namely: agricultural practices; fishery practices; forestry practices; algae-based feed, bioenergy and bio-sourced products; insect farming; bio-sourced materials. Other sub-modules are still being developed, for example, the land-management lever/module would consider actions/practices to address land degradation in the next future.

The electricity work package is developing a novel balancing/storage module to account for the intermittent supply of growing share of renewables. A new storage module, coupled with seasonal granularity is being added to the power sector.

The work package dealing with the integration of the modules and the development of the core modeling has developed a scalable model, enabling the integration of multiple countries with transboundary effects. In addition, the model architecture has been adapted so that each country can have its own set of levers and can be simulated independently. Furthermore, Import and Export interactions can now be modelled between EU countries and with the Rest of the World.

The work package dealing with the Transition Pathways Explorer development has developed an independent and autonomous way to couple the model calculation engine to the Pathways Explorer.

Final results

The major progress beyong the state of the art of the European Calculator project will be that it assembles more that 40 sector scenarios which can be utilised by users for a potential policy design in regard to transformation policy making. In parallel, the underlying methodology will be kept transparent and usable to any interested researcher or even lay man. Similar holds for the derived and the underlying data sources. In detail, the EUCalc project will provide a Transition Pathways Explorer to assess European and country policies related to transformation challenges, a my2050 e-learning tool and a MOOC for educational purposes. Despite these outputs, the underlying model remains free, open source and accessible through an online web tool / interface, and therefore open for discussions in the scientific community. Overall the approach will put energy system modelling on a new level of transparency.