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    Environmental co-benefits and adverse side-effects of alternative power sector decarbonization strategies
    ([London] : Nature Publishing Group UK, 2019) Luderer, Gunnar; Pehl, Michaja; Arvesen, Anders; Gibon, Thomas; Bodirsky, Benjamin L.; de Boer, Harmen Sytze; Fricko, Oliver; Hejazi, Mohamad; Humpenöder, Florian; Iyer, Gokul; Mima, Silvana; Mouratiadou, Ioanna; Pietzcker, Robert C.; Popp, Alexander; van den Berg, Maarten; van Vuuren, Detlef; Hertwich, Edgar G.
    A rapid and deep decarbonization of power supply worldwide is required to limit global warming to well below 2 °C. Beyond greenhouse gas emissions, the power sector is also responsible for numerous other environmental impacts. Here we combine scenarios from integrated assessment models with a forward-looking life-cycle assessment to explore how alternative technology choices in power sector decarbonization pathways compare in terms of non-climate environmental impacts at the system level. While all decarbonization pathways yield major environmental co-benefits, we find that the scale of co-benefits as well as profiles of adverse side-effects depend strongly on technology choice. Mitigation scenarios focusing on wind and solar power are more effective in reducing human health impacts compared to those with low renewable energy, while inducing a more pronounced shift away from fossil and toward mineral resource depletion. Conversely, non-climate ecosystem damages are highly uncertain but tend to increase, chiefly due to land requirements for bioenergy.
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    Looking under the hood: A comparison of techno-economic assumptions across national and global integrated assessment models
    (Amsterdam [u.a.] : Elsevier Science, 2018) Krey, Volker; Guo, Fei; Kolp, Peter; Zhou, Wenji; Schaeffer, Roberto; Awasthy, Aayushi; Bertram, Christoph; de Boer, Harmen-Sytze; Fragkos, Panagiotis; Fujimori, Shinichiro; He, Chenmin; Iyer, Gokul; Keramidas, Kimon; Köberle, Alexandre C.; Oshiro, Ken; Reis, Lara Aleluia; Shoai-Tehrani, Bianka; Vishwanathan, Saritha; Capros, Pantelis; Drouet, Laurent; Edmonds, James E.; Garg, Amit; Gernaat, David E.H.J.; Jiang, Kejun; Kannavou, Maria; Kitous, Alban; Kriegler, Elmar; Luderer, Gunnar; Mathur, Ritu; Muratori, Matteo; Sano, Fuminori; van Vuuren, Detlef P.
    Integrated assessment models are extensively used in the analysis of climate change mitigation and are informing national decision makers as well as contribute to international scientific assessments. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of techno-economic assumptions in the electricity sector among fifteen different global and national integrated assessment models. Particular focus is given to six major economies in the world: Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan and the US. The comparison reveals that techno-economic characteristics are quite different across integrated assessment models, both for the base year and future years. It is, however, important to recognize that techno-economic assessments from the literature exhibit an equally large range of parameters as the integrated assessment models reviewed. Beyond numerical differences, the representation of technologies also differs among models, which needs to be taken into account when comparing numerical parameters. While desirable, it seems difficult to fully harmonize techno-economic parameters across a broader range of models due to structural differences in the representation of technology. Therefore, making techno-economic parameters available in the future, together with of the technology representation as well as the exact definitions of the parameters should become the standard approach as it allows an open discussion of appropriate assumptions. © 2019 The Authors