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

2020, Malik, Aman, Bertram, Christoph, Despres, Jacques, Emmerling, Johannes, Fujimori, Shinichiro, Garg, Amit, Kriegler, Elmar, Luderer, Gunnar, Mathur, Ritu, Roelfsema, Mark, Shekhar, Swapnil, Vishwanathan, Saritha, Vrontisi, Zoi

Cost-effective achievement of the Paris Agreement's long-term goals requires the unanimous phase-out of coal power generation by mid-century. However, continued investments in coal power plants will make this transition difficult. India is one of the major countries with significant under construction and planned increase in coal power capacity. To ascertain the likelihood and consequences of the continued expansion of coal power for India's future mitigation options, we use harmonised scenario results from national and global models along with projections from various government reports. Both these approaches estimate that coal capacity is expected to increase until 2030, along with rapid developments in wind and solar power. However, coal capacity stranding of the order of 133–237 GW needs to occur after 2030 if India were to pursue an ambitious climate policy in line with a well-below 2 °C target. Earlier policy strengthening starting after 2020 can reduce stranded assets (14–159 GW) but brings with it political economy and renewable expansion challenges. We conclude that a policy limiting coal plants to those under construction combined with higher solar targets could be politically feasible, prevent significant stranded capacity, and allow higher mitigation ambition in the future.