Chapter 1 - Introduction

The ongoing energy transition is driven by a need to mitigate climate change and switch from fossil to low-carbon fuels and renewable energy. However, while technologies such as onshore and offshore wind energy, solar energy, and batteries have made significant progress over the past decades, and they can increasingly compete directly with fossil fuels, their deployment is still only a fraction of what is needed to fully decarbonize our economy-a process that is going to take at least several more decades and is going to require major investments. Also, the intermittent character of especially wind and solar energy will require major changes in, for example, storage of energy (both heat and electricity). How this transition will play out, and which technologies will ultimately become winners and losers are highly relevant questions which this book will help to answer by providing both the individual market deployment and cost reduction trends per technology and the results of modeling a portfolio of energy technologies in various sector models and overall energy models.