ALBERT

Description: Climate policy needs to account for political and social acceptance. Current national climate policy plans proposed under the Paris Agreement lead to higher emissions until 2030 than cost-effective pathways towards the Agreements' long-term temperature goals would imply. Therefore, the current plans would require highly disruptive changes, prohibitive transition speeds, and large long-term deployment of risky mitigation measures for achieving the agreement's temperature goals after 2030. Since the prospects of introducing the cost-effective policy instrument, a global comprehensive carbon price in the near-term, are negligible, we study how a strengthening of existing plans by a global roll-out of regional policies can ease the implementation challenge of reaching the Paris temperature goals. The regional policies comprise a bundle of regulatory policies in energy supply, transport, buildings, industry, and land use and moderate, regionally differentiated carbon pricing. We find that a global roll-out of these policies could reduce global CO2 emissions by an additional 10 GtCO2eq in 2030 compared to current plans. It would lead to emissions pathways close to the levels of cost-effective likely below 2 °C scenarios until 2030, thereby reducing implementation challenges post 2030. Even though a gradual phase-in of a portfolio of regulatory policies might be less disruptive than immediate cost-effective carbon pricing, it would perform worse in other dimensions. In particular, it leads to higher economic impacts that could become major obstacles in the long-term. Hence, such policy packages should not be viewed as alternatives to carbon pricing, but rather as complements that provide entry points to achieve the Paris climate goals.

Description: West African countries' energy and climate policies show a pronounced focus on decarbonising power supply through renewable electricity (RE) generation. In particular, most West African states explicitly focus on hybrid mixes of variable renewable power sources—solar, wind and hydropower—in their targets for the electricity sector. Hydropower, the main current RE resource in West Africa, is strongly sensitive to monsoon rainfall variability, which has led to power crises in the past. Therefore, solar and wind power could play a stronger role in the future as countries move to power systems with high shares of RE. Considering the policy focus on diversified RE portfolios, there is a strong need to provide climate services for assessing how these resources could function together in a power mix. In this study, climate data from the state-of-the-art ERA5 reanalysis is used to assess the synergies of solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind power potential in West Africa at hourly resolution. A new metric, the stability coefficient C stab, is developed to quantify the synergies of solar PV and wind power for achieving a balanced power output and limiting storage needs. Using this metric, it is demonstrated that there is potential for exploiting hybrid solar/wind power in a larger area of West Africa, covering more important centers of population and closer to existing grid structures, than would be suggested by average maps of solar and wind resource availability or capacity factor for the region. The results of this study highlight why multi-scale temporal synergies of power mixes should be considered in RE system planning from the start.

Description: Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt are currently embroiled in a politically charged conflict that surrounds the soon-to-be-completed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), with Ethiopia’s energy objectives purportedly conflicting with the water needs in Sudan and Egypt. Here we show that the multiple political and environmental challenges that surround GERD could be mitigated by explicitly coupling its operation to variable solar and wind power, which would create an incentive for Ethiopia to retain a seasonality in the Blue Nile flow. We found that this could deliver fivefold benefits across the three countries: decarbonizing power generation in the Eastern Africa Power Pool; allowing compliance with Sudan’s environmental flow needs; optimizing GERD’s infrastructure use; harmonizing the yearly refilling schedules of GERD and Egypt’s High Aswan Dam; and supporting a strong diversification of Ethiopian power generation for domestic use and for Eastern Africa Power Pool exports. These results argue for an explicit integration of complementary hydro, solar and wind power strategies in GERD operation and Eastern Africa Power Pool expansion planning.

Description: In support of West Africa's potential energy transition under climate change, an international team of scientists and a wide range of local stakeholders in Ghana and Burkina Faso jointly assessed different mitigation and adaptation pathways for energy and water supply and demand, including their implications for achieving SDGs, in a transdisciplinary approach. They iteratively co-developed a range of future scenarios based on i) stakeholder knowledge and priorities, ii) countries' national plans, and iii) simulations with a set of complementary energy and water models. Unlike current national plans, the more ambitious scenarios indicate that the projected rapid increase in electricity demand could be met almost entirely from renewables, but that a diversification beyond hydropower will be necessary. Phasing out fossil fuels would bring West African countries's energy policies in line with Paris Agreement targets and generate additional socio-economic and environmental co-benefits.