%0 Journal Article
%A Moksnes, N
%A Rozenberg, J
%A Broad, O
%A Taliotis, C
%A Howells, M
%A Rogner, H
%D 2019
%F discovery:10068536
%J Environmental Research Communications
%K Energy modelling, Scenario discovery, South America, OSeMOSYS
%T Determinants of energy futures - a scenario discovery method applied to cost and carbon emission futures for South American electricity infrastructure
%U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10068536/
%X 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.
%Z 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/