Zukünftige Energie- und Industriesysteme
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To limit global warming, the use of carbon capture and storage technologies (CCS) is considered to be of major importance. In addition to the technical-economic, ecological and political aspects, the question of social acceptance is a decisive factor for the implementation of such low-carbon technologies. This study is the first literature review addressing the acceptance of industrial CCS (iCCS). In contrast to electricity generation, the technical options for large-scale reduction of CO2 emissions in the energy-intensive industry sector are not sufficient to achieve the targeted GHG neutrality in the industrial sector without the use of CCS. Therefore, it will be crucial to determine which factors influence the acceptance of iCCS and how these findings can be used for policy and industry decision-making processes. The results show that there has been limited research on the acceptance of iCCS. In addition, the study highlights some important differences between the acceptance of iCCS and CCS. Due to the technical diversity of future iCCS applications, future acceptance research must be able to better address the complexity of the research subject.
The development of digital technologies is accelerating, enabling increasingly profound changes in increasingly short time periods. The changes affect almost all areas of the economy as well as society. The energy sector has already seen some effects of digitalization, but more drastic changes are expected in the next decades. Besides the very positive impacts on costs, system stability, and environmental effects, potential obstacles and risks need to be addressed to ensure that advantages can be exploited while adverse effects are avoided. A good understanding of available and future digital applications from different stakeholders' perspectives is necessary. This study proposes a framework for the holistic evaluation of digital applications in the energy sector. The framework consists of a combination of well-established methods, namely the multi-criteria analysis (MCA), the life cycle assessment (LCA), and expert interviews. The objective is to create transparency on benefits, obstacles, and risks as a basis for societal and political discussions and to supply the necessary information for the sustainable development and implementation of digital applications. The novelty of the proposed framework is the specific combination of the three methods and its setup to enable sound applicability to the wide variety of digital applications in the energy sector. The framework is tested subsequently on the example of the German smart meter roll-out. The results reveal that, on the one hand, the smart meter roll-out clearly offers the potential to increase the system stability and decrease the carbon emission intensity of the energy system. Therefore, the overall evaluation from an environmental perspective is positive. However, on the other hand, close attention needs to be paid to the required implementation and operational effort, the IT (information technology) and data security, the added value for the user, the social acceptance, and the realization of energy savings. Therefore, the energy utility perspective in particular results in an overall negative evaluation. Several areas with a need for action are identified. Overall, the proposed framework proves to be suitable for the holistic evaluation of this digital application.
The target of zero emissions sets a new standard for industry and industrial policy. Industrial policy in the twenty-first century must aim to achieve zero emissions in the energy and emissions intensive industries. Sectors such as steel, cement, and chemicals have so far largely been sheltered from the effects of climate policy. A major shift is needed, from contemporary industrial policy that mainly protects industry to policy strategies that transform the industry. For this purpose, we draw on a wide range of literatures including engineering, economics, policy, governance, and innovation studies to propose a comprehensive industrial policy framework. The policy framework relies on six pillars: directionality, knowledge creation and innovation, creating and reshaping markets, building capacity for governance and change, international coherence, and sensitivity to socio-economic implications of phase-outs. Complementary solutions relying on technological, organizational, and behavioural change must be pursued in parallel and throughout whole value chains. Current policy is limited to supporting mainly some options, e.g. energy efficiency and recycling, with some regions also adopting carbon pricing, although most often exempting the energy and emissions intensive industries. An extended range of options, such as demand management, materials efficiency, and electrification, must also be pursued to reach zero emissions. New policy research and evaluation approaches are needed to support and assess progress as these industries have hitherto largely been overlooked in domestic climate policy as well as international negotiations.
Energy sufficiency is one of the three energy sustainability strategies, next to energy efficiency and renewable energies. We analyse to what extent European governments follow this strategy, by conducting a systematic document analysis of all available European National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) and Long-Term Strategies (LTSs). We collect and categorise a total of 230 sufficiency-related policy measures, finding large differences between countries. We find most sufficiency policies in the transport sector, when classifying also modal shift policies to change the service quality of transport as sufficiency policies. Types of sufficiency policy instruments vary considerably from sector to sector, for instance the focus on financial incentives and fiscal instruments in the mobility sector, information in the building sector, and financial incentive/tax instruments in cross-sectoral application. Regulatory instruments currently play a minor role for sufficiency policy in the national energy and climate plans of EU member states. Similar to energy efficiency in recent decades, sufficiency still largely referred to as micro-level individual behaviour change or necessary exogenous trends that will need to take place. It is not treated yet as a genuine field of policy action to provide the necessary framework for enabling societal change.
Damit sich die weltweit zunehmend ambitionierten Klimaschutzziele erreichen lassen, müssen auch im Industriesektor weitgehende Emissionsreduktionen innerhalb weniger Jahrzehnte realisiert werden. Expertinnen und Experten sind sich einig, dass dies nicht ohne den Umstieg von fossilen auf erneuerbare Energieträger und Rohmaterialien - sogenannte Feedstocks - umsetzbar ist. Im Zuge der verstärkten Nutzung dieser grünen Energieträger ist denkbar, dass sich deren Verfügbarkeit und Kosten zu immer wichtigeren Standortfaktoren für die Produktion industrieller Güter entwickeln werden. Dies könnte dazu führen, dass zukünftig Standorte mit kostengünstiger Verfügbarkeit von erneuerbaren Energien attraktiver gegenüber anderen Standorten werden und es dann zu Standortverlagerungen kommt - insbesondere im Bereich der energieintensiven Industrie.
In dem vorliegenden Artikel greifen die Autoren diese möglichen Verlagerungen industrieller Produktion auf. In diesem Zusammenhang führen sie auch den Begriff "Renewables Pull" ein. Die in bestimmten Regionen der Welt kostengünstig und in großen Mengen verfügbaren erneuerbaren Energien könnten nach Ansicht der Autoren künftig eine Sogwirkung auslösen und bestimmte Teile der industriellen Produktion anziehen - auch Pull-Effekt genannt.
Aufbruch zur strategischen Autonomie der EU in der Kriegsführung mit Mitteln wirtschaftlichen Zwangs
(2021)
Die geopolitische Situation ist im Umbruch. Wir sind im Übergang zu einer multipolaren Situation, die Hegemonialkonkurrenten organisieren sich in Blöcken. Die Stratifizierung des Raumes der Wirtschaft, "Globalisierung" genannt, verliert ihre Basis, die strikte Trennung von der Politik der Hegemonialkonkurrenten. Wirtschaft wird nun in Dienst genommen für politische Ziele. Das erfordert Aufrüstung in Mitteln der Wirtschaftskriegsführung. China und die USA sind darin weit vorangegangen. Die EU hat entschieden, ihrerseits nachzurüsten, um auf Augenhöhe zu kommen.
Local implementation projects for sector coupling play an important role in the transformation to a more sustainable energy system. Despite various technical possibilities, there are various barriers to the realisation of local projects. Against this backdrop, we introduce an inter- and transdisciplinary approach to identifying and evaluating different power-to-X paths as well as setting up robust local implementation projects, which account for existing drivers and potential hurdles early on. After developing the approach conceptually, we exemplify our elaborations by applying them to a use case in the German city of Wuppertal. It can be shown that a mix of several interlinked interdisciplinary methods as well as several participatory elements is suitable for triggering a collective, local innovation process. However, the timing and extent of end-user integration remain a balancing act. The paper does not focus on a detailed description of power-to-X (PtX) as a central pillar of the sustainable transformation of the energy system. Rather, it focuses on the innovative methodological approach used to select a suitable use path and design a corresponding business model. The research approach was successfully implemented in the specific case study. However, it also becomes clear that the local-specific consideration entails limitations with regard to the transferability of the research design to other spatial contexts.
We conduct a systematic, interdisciplinary review of empirical literature assessing evidence on induced innovation in energy and related technologies. We explore links between demand-drivers (both market-wide and targeted); indicators of innovation (principally, patents); and outcomes (cost reduction, efficiency, and multi-sector/macro consequences). We build on existing reviews in different fields and assess over 200 papers containing original data analysis. Papers linking drivers to patents, and indicators of cumulative capacity to cost reductions (experience curves), dominate the literature. The former does not directly link patents to outcomes; the latter does not directly test for the causal impact of on cost reductions). Diverse other literatures provide additional evidence concerning the links between deployment, innovation activities, and outcomes. We derive three main conclusions. (1) Demand-pull forces enhance patenting; econometric studies find positive impacts in industry, electricity and transport sectors in all but a few specific cases. This applies to all drivers - general energy prices, carbon prices, and targeted interventions that build markets. (2) Technology costs decline with cumulative investment for almost every technology studied across all time periods, when controlled for other factors. Numerous lines of evidence point to dominant causality from at-scale deployment (prior to self-sustaining diffusion) to cost reduction in this relationship. (3) Overall Innovation is cumulative, multi-faceted, and self-reinforcing in its direction (path-dependent). We conclude with brief observations on implications for modeling and policy. In interpreting these results, we suggest distinguishing the economics of active deployment, from more passive diffusion processes, and draw the following implications. There is a role for policy diversity and experimentation, with evaluation of potential gains from innovation in the broadest sense. Consequently, endogenising innovation in large-scale models is important for deriving policy-relevant conclusions. Finally, seeking to relate quantitative economic evaluation to the qualitative socio-technical transitions literatures could be a fruitful area for future research.
Despite Germany's Paris Agreement pledge and coal exit legislation, the political debate around carbon-intensive coal remains heated. Coal power and mining have played an important, yet changing role in the history of German politics. In this paper, we analyze the entire parliamentary debate on coal in the German parliament (Bundestag) from its inception in 1949 to 2019. For this purpose we extract the more than 870,000 parliamentary speeches from all protocols in the history of the Bundestag. We identify the 9167 speeches mentioning coal and apply dynamic topic modeling – an unsupervised machine learning technique that reveals the changing thematic structure of large document collections over time - to analyze changes in parliamentary debates on coal over the past 70 years. The trends in topics and their varying internal structure reflect how energy policy was discussed and legitimized over time: Initially, coal was framed as a driver of economic prosperity and guarantee of energy security. In recent years, the debate evolved towards energy transition, coal phase-out and renewable energy expansion. Germany’s smaller and younger parties, the Greens and the Left Party, debate coal more often in the context of the energy transition and climate protection than other parties. Our results reflect trends in other countries and other fields of energy policy. Methodologically, our study illustrates the potential of and need for computational methods to analyze vast corpora of text and to complement traditional social science methods.
The number of input-output assessments focused on energy has grown considerably in the last years. Many of these assessments combine data from multi-regional input-output (MRIO) databases with energy extensions that completely or partially depict the different stages through which energy products are supplied or used in the economy.
The improper use of some energy extensions can lead to double accounting of some energy flows, but the frequency with which this happens and the potential impact on the results are unknown. Based on a literature review, we estimate that around a quarter of the MRIO-based energy assessments reviewed incurred into double accounting. Using the EXIOBASE MRIO database, we also analyse the effects of double accounting in the absolute values and rankings of different countries' and products' energy footprints.
Building on the insights provided by our analysis, we offer a set of key recommendations to MRIO users to avoid the double accounting problem in the future. Likewise, we conclude that the harmonisation of the energy data across MRIO databases led by experts could simplify the choices of the data users until the provision of official energy extensions by statistical offices becomes a widespread practice.