Reports & Papers

Since the Paris Agreement's adoption in 2015, a majority of the world's largest investors have begun to take action on climate change. According to a new report, the 2016–2017 year showed an average improvement in decarbonization within all major investor categories except pension funds.

For a century, the geopolitics of energy has been synonymous with the
geopolitics of oil and gas. However, geopolitics and the global energy economy
are both changing. The international order predominant since the
end of World War II faces mounting challenges. At the same time, renewable
energy is growing rapidly. Nevertheless, the geopolitics of renewable
energy has received relatively little attention, especially when considering
the far-reaching consequences of a global shift to renewable energy.

The paper starts with a discussion of seven renewable energy scenarios
for the coming decades: the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2016, the EIA’s
International Energy Outlook 2016, IRENA’s REmap 2016, Bloomberg’s
New Energy Outlook 2016, BP’s Energy Outlook 2016, Exxon-Mobil’s Outlook
for Energy 2016 and the joint IEA and IRENA G20 de-carbonization
scenario.

"A successful international climate policy framework will have to meet two conditions, build a coalition of countries that is potentially effective and give each member country sufficient incentives to join and remain in this coalition. Such coalition should be capable of delivering ambitious emission reduction even if some countries do not take mitigation action. In addition, it should meet the target without exceedingly high mitigation costs and deliver a net benefit to member countries as a whole. The novel contribution of this paper is mostly methodological, but it also adds a better qualification of well-known results that are policy relevant."

This study, undertaken for the European Commissioner for Energy and the European Commissioner for Climate Action, assesses the concept of renewable energy imports from North Africa to Europe. Often referred to as "Desertec", this concept involves great amounts of renewable energy capacity - mainly solar - to be rolled out in the Sahara desert to generate clean electricty both for domestic markets as well as for export to Europe through high-voltage transmission across the Mediterranean Sea. Regarded by some as a great leap towards the European goals of energy security and climate change mitigation, others view the concept as a pipe dream or even a wrong turn of European energy policy. Rather than answering this question, the authors find that Europe is not yet even in the position to decide on the concept: a host of barriers are prohibitively high at this point. This paper disaggregates these barriers into three categories: directly related barriers that must be addressed as much as is needed to reach feasibilty of the concept, indirectly related barriers that are being worked at already for other reasons and therefore should not figure in the debate about the concept of trans-Mediterranean trade in renewable energy, and lastly a set of barriers that are overestimated and should not hold up progress. This paper concludes by matching each barrier with concrete policy recommendations to the European Union for the coming years.