Zukünftige Energie- und Industriesysteme
Refine
Year of Publication
- 2018 (87) (remove)
Document Type
- Report (24)
- Peer-Reviewed Article (21)
- Part of a Book (18)
- Contribution to Periodical (15)
- Conference Object (6)
- Doctoral Thesis (2)
- Working Paper (1)
New energy technologies may fail to make the transition to the market once research funding has ended due to a lack of private engagement to conclude their development. Extending public funding to cover such experimental developments could be one way to improve this transition. However, identifying promising research and development (R&D) proposals for this purpose is a difficult task for the following reasons: Close-to-market implementations regularly require substantial resources while public budgets are limited; the allocation of public funds needs to be fair, open, and documented; the evaluation is complex and subject to public sector regulations for public engagement in R&D funding. This calls for a rigorous evaluation process. This paper proposes an operational three-staged decision support system (DSS) to assist decision-makers in public funding institutions in the ex-ante evaluation of R&D proposals for large-scale close-to-market projects in energy research. The system was developed based on a review of literature and related approaches from practice combined with a series of workshops with practitioners from German public funding institutions. The results confirm that the decision-making process is a complex one that is not limited to simply scoring R&D proposals. Decision-makers also have to deal with various additional issues such as determining the state of technological development, verifying market failures or considering existing funding portfolios. The DSS that is suggested in this paper is unique in the sense that it goes beyond mere multi-criteria aggregation procedures and addresses these issues as well to help guide decision-makers in public institutions through the evaluation process.
The production of commodities by energy-intensive industry is responsible for 1/3 of annual global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The climate goal of the Paris Agreement, to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C, requires global GHG emissions reach net-zero and probably negative by 2055-2080. Given the average economic lifetime of industrial facilities is 20 years or more, this indicates all new investment must be net-zero emitting by 2035-2060 or be compensated by negative emissions to guarantee GHG-neutrality. We argue, based on a sample portfolio of emerging and near-commercial technologies for each sector (largely based on zero carbon electricity & heat sources, biomass and carbon capture, and catalogued in an accompanying database), that reducing energy-intensive industrial GHG emissions to Paris Agreement compatible levels may not only be technically possible, but can be achieved with sufficient prioritization and policy effort. We then review policy options to drive innovation and investment in these technologies. From this we synthesize a preliminary integrated strategy for a managed transition with minimum stranded assets, unemployment, and social trauma that recognizes the competitive and globally traded nature of commodity production. The strategy includes: an initial policy commitment followed by a national and sectoral stakeholder driven pathway process to build commitment and identify opportunities based on local zero carbon resources; penetration of near-commercial technologies through increasing valuation of GHG material intensity through GHG pricing or flexible regulations with protection for competitiveness and against carbon leakage; research and demand support for the output of pilot plants, including some combination of guaranteed above-market prices that decline with output and an increasing requirement for low carbon inputs in government procurement; and finally, key supporting institutions.
Behälterglasherstellung
(2018)
There is an increasing pressure that enhanced and novel energy technologies are swiftly adopted by the market to ensure meeting the energy and climate targets. An important issue with such novel developments is their risk to be stuck in the "valley of death", i.e. that their transition to the market is delayed or unsuccessful. Publicly supported demonstration projects could help to bridge the valley of death by reducing barriers to the adoption caused by missing information and perceived risks. A challenge for technology demonstrations in the industrial context is their often high investments that are required to prove their real-world benefits. Given the magnitude of such investments, it becomes crucial that public funding focuses on the most promising demonstration proposals. Structured evaluation processes can help to facilitate the identification of promising proposals and to improve the quality and transparency of decisions. This paper deals with a corresponding multi-staged multi-criteria decision support system (DSS) suggested to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. It deals with the evaluation of demonstration proposals across three stages: The first stage represents a filtering stage to identify those proposals relevant for further considerations. The second stage comprises a multi-criteria scoring method drawing on an evaluation against nineteen criteria. The final third stage serves to critically review the need for public funding of well-scored proposals. This contribution outlines the development of the DSS and its design and thus provides insights on proposal evaluating in energy research.
Urban areas, being responsible for large shares of global greenhouse gas emissions, are important arenas for achieving global decarbonisation. However, the systemic challenge of decarbonisation requires deep structural changes - transitions - that take place across multiple scales and along entire value chains. We argue in this article that understanding the role of urban areas for global decarbonisation therefore requires consideration of their context and analysis of urban areas' contributions to transitions that extend past the individual urban area. We develop an analytical framework that proposes three principal ways urban areas contribute to low-carbon transitions and ten competences that regional and local governance actors have to support them. We apply this framework to the Cologne metropolitan area in Germany to demonstrate the ability of our framework to relate urban-scale activities to more encompassing low-carbon transitions. The paper concludes with future research possibilities.
The German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) is home to important clusters of energy-intensive basic materials industries. 15% of the EU's primary steel as well as 15% of high-value base chemicals are produced here. Together with refinery fuels, cement, lime and paper production (also overrepresented in NRW) these are the most carbon-intensive production processes of the industrial metabolism. To achieve the ambitious regional and national climate goals without relocating these clusters, carbon-neutral production will have to become standard by mid-century. We develop and evaluate three conceptual long-term scenarios towards carbon-neutral industry systems for NRW for 2050 and beyond:
* a first scenario depending on carbon capture and storage or use for heavy industries (iCCS),
* a second scenario sketching the direct electrification of industrial processes (and transport) and
* a third scenario relying on the import of low carbon energies (e.g. biomass, and synthetic fuels (like methanol) for the use in industries and transport. All scenarios share the assumption that electricity generation will be CO2-neutral by 2050.
For all three scenarios energy efficiency, primary energy demand for energy services and feedstock as well as the carbon balance are quantified. We apply a spatial-explicit analysis of production sites to allow for discussion of infrastructure re-use and net investment needs. Possible symbiotic relations between sectors are also included. The robustness of the three conceptualised future carbon-neutral industry systems is then analysed using a multi-criteria approach, including e.g. energy security issues and lock-ins on the way to 2050.
Der hier vorliegende Report ist das Ergebnis des Teilprojekts "Transformation und Vernetzung städtischer Energieinfrastrukturen", welches Teil des "Rahmenprogramms zur Umsetzung der Energiewende in den Kommunen des Ruhrgebiets - Energiewende Ruhr" ist.
Die Transformation der Energieinfrastruktur, in einer Region die noch immer überwiegend auf zentrale Erzeugung und entsprechende Versorgungssysteme ausgerichtet sind, zählt zu den großen Herausforderungen einer gelungenen Energiewende - auch wenn nur ein Teil dieser Herausforderungen in der Region selbst beeinflusst werden kann.
Im Rahmen des Teilprojekts wurden zentrale technologisch-infrastrukturelle Herausforderungen im Kontext der Umsetzung der Energiewende im kommunalen Bereich analysiert. Insbesondere war hierbei von Interesse, wie das gezielte Vernetzen unterschiedlicher Infrastrukturbereiche (Strom, Wärme, Verkehr) einen Beitrag dazu leisten kann, Effizienzpotenziale zu heben und damit ein nachhaltiges und zukunftsfähiges Infrastruktursystem zu schaffen. Inhaltlich fokussierten die Analysen auf die Bereiche Kraft-Wärme-Kopplung (KWK) und Wasserstoff.
Bislang wurden solche mittel- und langfristigen Transformationsprozesse häufig allein durch technologiebezogene Szenarien und Strategien beschrieben. Der Ansatz erweist sich zunehmend als nicht zielführend, da er sich zu sehr auf einzelne Technologiebereiche beschränkt und das systemische Zusammenspiel zu wenig beleuchtet. Zudem werden weitere Faktoren (Nutzerverhalten, Investitionsentscheidungen, finanzielle Handlungsspielräume auf der Verbraucherseite, Akteursnetzwerke etc.) zumeist nur marginal betrachtet. Im Rahmen des Projekts wurde daher der methodische Zugang einer Cross-Impact-Bilanz gewählt, um diskursiv und partizipatorisch qualitative Zukunftsbilder für die Technologiebereiche zu entwerfen.