Climate change is one of the main challenges that mankind has to face in the 21st century. There is scientific evidence that world climate is experiencing global warming, which might have detrimental effects on socio-economic systems if not sufficiently mitigated. The greenhouse gas emissions related to human activities, fostered by economic and population growth, have been identified as being “extremely likely” the cause of such an increase. The reduction of such emissions is thus a vital target for the coming decades.
From a technology perspective, power generation is the largest responsible for CO2 emissions, therefore great mitigation efforts will be required in this area. From a policy perspective, it is common opinion that the European Union is and will remain leader in implementing clean climate policies. Hence, the power sector and the EU have been chosen as the two key actors of the MERCURY project (although results have been produced and discussed on a global scale as well, as climate is a global issue).
The overarching objective of the project is to explore future climate change mitigation pathways, analyzing in particular the main low-carbon power generation technologies: renewables, Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS), and nuclear. This study has been carried out adopting the Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) WITCH and has been divided into two phases. Firstly, the prospects of renewables (specifically solar photovoltaics, PV), CCS, and nuclear have been analyzed. In particular, attention is focused not so much on the pure technology aspects, but rather on policy issues such as i) the role of the cost evolution in renewable diffusion, ii) the slow CCS deployment, and iii) the effects of the nuclear reactors ageing or of their phase-out. Secondly, future mitigation scenarios have been investigated considering different levels of participation by world countries in the mitigation action led by the EU.
Such a research work has the ultimate practical objective of providing policy-makers, as well as industry and other relevant stakeholders, with insightful information on future low-carbon routes which can be used for the definition and the implementation of effective policies for climate change mitigation and the development of technological solutions to fulfill them.
This work was carried out in the return phase of the project at Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei: the first year at the outgoing host (the Renewable & Appropriate Energy Laboratory, RAEL, at the University of California, Berkeley) was instead dedicated to the improvement of the WITCH model and to the interactions and joint applications between WITCH and SWITCH, the detailed model of the electricity sector developed at RAEL.
