Energy and development : A modelling approach

Rapid economic growth of developing countries like India and China implies that these countries become important actors in the global energy system. Examples of this impact are the present day oil shortages and rapidly increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Global energy models are used explore possible future developments of the global energy system and identify policies to prevent potential problems. Such estimations of future energy use in developing countries are very uncertain. Crucial factors in the future energy use of these regions are electrification, urbanisation and income distribution, issues that are generally not included in present day global energy models. Model simulations in this thesis show that current insight in developments in low-income regions lead to a wide range of expected energy use in 2030 of the residential and transport sectors. This is mainly caused by many different model calibration options that result from the limited data availability for model development and calibration. We developed a method to identify the impact of model calibration uncertainty on future projections. We developed a new model for residential energy use in India, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science. Experiments with this model show that the impact of electrification and income distribution is less univocal than often assumed. The use of fuelwood, with related health risks, can decrease rapidly if the income of poor groups increases. However, there is a trade off in terms of CO2 emissions because these groups gain access to electricity and the ownership of appliances increases. Another issue is the potential role of new technologies in developing countries: will they use the opportunities of leapfrogging? We explored the potential role of hydrogen, an energy carrier that might play a central role in a sustainable energy system. We found that hydrogen only plays a role before 2050 under very optimistic assumptions. Regional energy policies have an important role. For instance, low energy taxes and subsidies in developing countries limit the opportunities to promote alternative energy options. A final issue in this thesis is the impact of the changing development context – depletion of fossil fuels and climate change – on the economic development of low-income regions. We developed a stylized population-economy-energy-climate model (SUSCLIME) in which automated agents can take policy-decisions and develop strategies to cope with resource depletion and climate change. From preliminary model experiments it appears that developing countries are more vulnerable to both resource depletion and climate change. A co-benefit of a long-term focus on avoiding climate change is that it also slows down fossil resource depletion. A short-term focus to reduce impacts from depletion of endogenous fossil resources has probably not much synergy with climate policy because imported fossil energy (or coal) is more attractive than developing alternatives.