Other modelling developments
date: 14/10/2019
- Researchers at the Coppe Institute at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro are working on improving the integration of the global CGE model TEA with the Brazilian bottom-up Land Use and Energy System (BLUES) model as it is used to analyse the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus. The key scientific challenge in the FEW nexus analyses is the representation of water use in the BLUES model. The food, energy and water systems are interrelated, and water use is the main outcome in the energy and land use systems. The soft-linking procedure used for the integration of bottom-up BLUES model into TEA provides macroeconomic consistency to the national model. This work is in progress, and there are no publications yet.
- A team of researchers across RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE), the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, the MaREI Centre, and Politecnico di Milano have published a new inter-model comparison on the role of Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) in achieving 1.5ºC and 2ºC scenarios. DACCS is an alternative negative emissions technology (NET) with the potential to significantly reduce the mitigation costs of climate action, and it can be used in conjunction with other NETs. DACCS is increasingly gaining attention as a CO2 sequestration option, but as it is in its early development stages the risks associated with its deployment are yet unknown. In their latest article, the researchers add two synthetic direct air capture technologies for CO2 removal and sequestration (aqueous hydroxide solutions and amine-modified solid sorbents) to the TIAM-Grantham model. The TIAM-Grantham model is an IAM developed by the Grantham Institute based on the ETSAP-TIAM model. Additionally, the model was inter-compared with the WITCH integrated assessment model. The key limitation of DACCS deployment is the rate at which it can be scaled up. The authors find that due to the required sorbent production and the energy input required for large scale deployment, DACCS should be used alongside other mitigation options in a diversified portfolio of mitigation strategies, rather than instead of.
- A recent article in Energy compares the techno-economic assumptions across national and global IAMs of climate change. The team behind the publication is led by researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and includes researchers from 19 science and policy institutes around the world. The study reviews the techno-economic assumptions in the electricity sector among 15 different global and national IAMs with a focus on their application in Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan and the USA. It concludes that techno-economic characteristics and the representation of technologies differ among models, and those differences need to be accounted in the comparisons of numerical parameters. To improve comparability of assumptions across national and global IAMs, the authors call for publishing techno-economic parameters together with documentation of the technology representation.