%D 2019
%L discovery10068536
%T Determinants of energy futures - a scenario discovery method applied to cost and carbon emission futures for South American electricity infrastructure
%O 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/
%A N Moksnes
%A J Rozenberg
%A O Broad
%A C Taliotis
%A M Howells
%A H Rogner
%K Energy modelling, Scenario discovery, South America, OSeMOSYS
%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.
%J Environmental Research Communications