@article{discovery10068536, journal = {Environmental Research Communications}, title = {Determinants of energy futures - a scenario discovery method applied to cost and carbon emission futures for South American electricity infrastructure}, year = {2019}, month = {February}, note = {As the Version of Record of this article is going to be/has been published on a gold open access basis under a CC BY 3.0 licence, this Accepted Manuscript is available for reuse under a CC BY 3.0 licence immediately. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/}, keywords = {Energy modelling, Scenario discovery, South America, OSeMOSYS}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1088/2515-7620/ab06de}, author = {Moksnes, N and Rozenberg, J and Broad, O and Taliotis, C and Howells, M and Rogner, H}, abstract = {Energy policy and investment are commonly informed by a small number of scenarios, modelled with proprietary models and closed data-sets. It limits what levels of insight that can be derived from it. This paper overcomes these critical concerns by exploring a large number of scenarios with an open-data and open-source model to address regional mitigation policy. Focusing on South America, we translate an ensemble of long-term electricity supply scenarios into policy insights and use post-processing methods to present a systematic mapping of solution outputs to model inputs. We find demand levels, the cost of capital and the level of CO2-limits to be significant determinants of total investment cost. Low-carbon pathways are associated with low demand and low cost of capital. When cost of capital increases a shift away from wind and hydropower to natural gas and solar PV is seen. We further show that appropriate concessionary finance together with energy efficiency measures are critical - at a continental level - to unlock economic, low-carbon investment.} }