Policies for capacity development

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Renewable energy in remote communities

This article is the result of a competitively tendered University-funded project, this brings together two major Government Policy areas: sustainable communities and use of carbon fuels, and is aimed at influencing the policy debate on the difficulties of linking remote communities to renewable energy production because of poor distribution networks. Linkage with the Sustainable Communities agenda is an essential ingredient, as the proposal is that the renewable energy technologies will be installed and maintained by the communities themselves

Low-carbon energy: a roadmap

Technologies available today, and those expected to become competitive over the next decade, will permit a rapid decarbonization of the global energy economy. New renewable energy technologies, combined with a broad suite of energy-efficiency advances, will allow global energy needs to be met without fossil fuels and by adding only minimally to the cost of energy services The world is now in the early stages of an energy revolution that over the next few decades could be as momentous as the emergence of oiland electricity-based economies a century ago. Double-digit market growth, annual capital flows of more than $100 billion, sharp declines in technology costs, and rapid progress in the sophistication and effectiveness of government policies all herald a promising new energy era. Advanced automotive, electronics, and buildings systems will allow a substantial reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, at negative costs once the savings in energy bills is accounted for. The savings from these measures can effectively pay for a significant portion of the additional cost of advanced renewable energy technologies to replace fossil fuels, including wind, solar, geothermal, and bioenergy. Resource estimates indicate that renewable energy is more abundant than all of the fossil fuels combined, and that well before mid-century it will be possible to run most national electricity systems with minimal fossil fuels and only 10 percent of the carbon emissions they produce today. The development of smart electricity grids, the integration of plug-in electric vehicles, and the addition of limited storage capacity will allow power to be provided without the baseload plants that are the foundation of today's electricity systems. Recent climate simulations conclude that CO2 emissions will need to peak within the next decade and decline by at least 50 to 80 percent by 2050. This challenge will be greatly complicated by the fact that China, India, and other developing countries are now rapidly developing modern energy systems. The only chance of slowing the buildup of CO2 concentrations soon enough to avoid catastrophic climate change that could take centuries to reverse is to transform the energy economies of industrial and developing countries almost simultaneously. This would have seemed nearly impossible a few years ago, but since then, the energy policies and markets of China and India have begun to change rapidly -- more rapidly than those in many industrial countries. Renewable and efficiency technologies will allow developing countries to increase their reliance on indigenous resources and reduce their dependence on expensive and unstable imported fuelsAround the world, new energy systems could become a huge engine of industrial development and job creation, opening vast new economic opportunities. Developing countries have the potential to "leapfrog" the carbon-intensive development path of the 20th century and go straight to the advanced energy systems that are possible today. Improved technology and high energy prices have created an extraordinarily favorable market for new energy systems over the past few years. But reaching a true economic tipping point will require innovative public policies and strong political leadership

Carbon Emission Policies in Key Economies

The Australian Government asked the Productivity Commission to undertake a study on the ‘effective’ carbon prices that result from emissions and energy reduction policies in Australia and other key economies (the UK, USA, Germany, New Zealand, China, India, Japan and South Korea). The Commissions research report, released 9 June 2011, provides a stocktake of the large number of policy measures in the electricity generation and road transport sectors of the countries studied. And it provides estimates of the burdens associated with these policies in each country and the abatement achieved. While the results are based on a robust methodology, data limitations have meant that some estimates could only be indicative. More than 1000 carbon policy measures were identified in the nine countries studied, ranging from (limited) emissions trading schemes to policies that support particular types of abatement technology. While these disparate measures cannot be expressed as an equivalent single price on greenhouse gas emissions, all policies impose costs that someone must pay. The Commission has interpreted ‘effective’ carbon prices broadly to mean the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions — the ‘price’ of abatement achieved by particular policies. The estimated cost per unit of abatement achieved varied widely, both across programs within each country and in aggregate across countries. The relative cost effectiveness of price-based approaches is illustrated for Australia by stylised modelling that suggests that the abatement from existing policies for electricity could have been achieved at a fraction of the cost. The estimated price effects of supply-side policies have generally been modest, other than for electricity in Germany and the UK. Such price uplifts are of some relevance to assessing carbon leakage and competitiveness impacts, but are very preliminary and substantially more information would be required.carbon pricing; cost abatement; greenhouse gas emissions; abatement technology; carbon policy; energy reduction policy; emissions trading scheme; carbon leakage

A roadmap for China to peak carbon dioxide emissions and achieve a 20% share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy by 2030

As part of its Paris Agreement commitment, China pledged to peak carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions around 2030, striving to peak earlier, and to increase the non-fossil share of primary energy to 20% by 2030. Yet by the end of 2017, China emitted 28% of the world's energy-related CO2 emissions, 76% of which were from coal use. How China can reinvent its energy economy cost-effectively while still achieving its commitments was the focus of a three-year joint research project completed in September 2016. Overall, this analysis found that if China follows a pathway in which it aggressively adopts all cost-effective energy efficiency and CO2 emission reduction technologies while also aggressively moving away from fossil fuels to renewable and other non-fossil resources, it is possible to not only meet its Paris Agreement Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) commitments, but also to reduce its 2050 CO2 emissions to a level that is 42% below the country's 2010 CO2 emissions. While numerous barriers exist that will need to be addressed through effective policies and programs in order to realize these potential energy use and emissions reductions, there are also significant local environmental (e.g., air quality), national and global environmental (e.g., mitigation of climate change), human health, and other unquantified benefits that will be realized if this pathway is pursued in China