EU 20-20-20 energy policy as a model for global climate mitigation

Abstract

The EU has established an aggressive portfolio with explicit near-term targets for 2020 – to reduce GHG emissions by 20%, rising to 30% if the conditions are right, to increase the share of renewable energy to 20%, and to make a 20% improvement in energy efficiency – intended to be the first step in a long-term strategy to limit climate forcing. The effectiveness and cost of extending these measures in time are considered along with the ambition and propagation to the rest of the world. Numerical results are reported and analysed for the contribution of the portfolio's various elements through a set of sensitivity experiments. It is found that the hypothetical programme leads to very substantial reductions in GHG emissions, dramatic increases in use of electricity, and substantial changes in land-use including reduced deforestation, but at the expense of higher food prices. The GHG emissions reductions are driven primarily by the direct limits. Although the carbon price is lower under the hypothetical protocol than it would be under the emissions cap alone, the economic cost of the portfolio is higher, between 13% and 22%.

Policy relevance

This article explores the potential to extend the present EU Energy Policy and propagate it to the global community. It decomposes the contribution to climate mitigation from each of the policy's elements. The costs of our hypothetical protocol are estimated and compared to the cost of a simple cap-and-trade regime. Although more expensive than a policy that directly reduced emissions, additional costs were between 13% and 22%. By directly exploring a potential global mitigation strategy, this work is directly relevant to the international climate policy dialogue.

Keywords:

• climate policy
• climate stabilization
• emissions mitigation
• energy policy

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for research support provided by the Research Council of Norway. The authors acknowledge long-term support for GCAM development from the Integrated Assessment Research Program in the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Notes

1. In this article the GCAM was called MiniCAM.

2. The accession assumptions are arbitrary and are introduced to explore the effect of a regime that is initially partial in coverage, and therefore subject to global system interactions.

3. The subsidy is paid for by a tax on end-use power consumers in transport, buildings, and industry.

4. Note that the temperature results reported in this section and in Figure 5 are a transient temperature change and not an equilibrium temperature change.