Integrated assessment of innovative energy technologies
Focusing on energy technology dynamics and the impact of R&D actions on technological developments, the SAPIENTA project covered non-power technologies and addressed sustainable development concerns and indicators. Moreover, the project work developed an R&D decision support tool that allows users to conduct portfolio analysis taking into consideration various "traditional" and sustainable development targets. Results on RTD priorities, innovation policy, energy and emission scenario developments, as well as analytical and quantified results for specifying the mechanisms of induced technological progress were collected. These results have been included in the decision support tool ISPA (Integrated R&D Policy Exploration) and the extended tool for the generation of stochastic information PROMETHEUS. More specifically, the PROMETHEUS stochastic model offered the anticipated effects and variance-covariance matrices of these effects that were employed during ISPA construction. The main issue was to explore the form of the function between the R&D allocated to a technology and the expected impact on a given objective. The model followed involved an increased degree of complexity and results were found to be very sensitive to budget size. Researchers used various exploration techniques and the derived results showed that the obtained solution is highly dependent on included technologies. Thereby, it refers to a 20-26% of the budget to non-conventional vehicles, 22-26% to nuclear, 25-27% to renewables, and 17-21% to clean coal technologies. For fuel cells it seems that the share is 10% when the emphasis is put on market impact, while it becomes 3.5% when emphasis is placed on other objectives.
