William Blyth

The climate crisis requires developing countries to urgently decarbonize energy systems and mobilize finance while balancing competing priorities such as economic growth, energy security, environmental sustainability, and social development. However, many developing countries face challenges in developing long-term energy planning strategies, including limited capacity and reliance on external consultants. To address these issues, 21 international organizations and research institutions have developed five strategic principles for energy planning: national ownership, coherence and inclusivity, human capacity development, analysis robustness, and transparency and accessibility of data and tools. This paper discusses joint efforts to promote and apply these principles using science-based evidence and analytical modelling tools, such as the Open Source Energy Modelling System (OSeMOSYS) and the power system IRENA FlexTool. These tools are part of a suite of emerging modelling tools to ...

As current production and consumption patterns of humanity exceed planetary boundaries, many opinion leaders have stressed the need to adopt green economic stimulus policies in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we provide an integrated multi-stakeholder framework to design an economic recovery strategy aligned with sustainability objectives. We first employ quantitative energy and economic models and then design a multi-criteria decision process in which we engage social actors from government, enterprises, and civil society. As a case study, we select green recovery measures that are relevant for a European Union country and assess their appropriateness with numerous criteria related to socio-economic and environmental sustainability and resilience. Results highlight trade-offs between immediate and long-run effects, between economic and environmental objectives, and between expert evidence and societal priorities. Importantly, we find that a ‘return-to-normal’ economic...

... The authors thank Shardul Agrawala, Martina Bosi, Stephen Bygrave, Jan Corfee-Morlot, Jane Ellis, Meredydd Evans, Tom Jones, Jonathan Pershing, Cédric Philibert and Nelly Petkova for the information, comments and ideas they provided. ...

The changing electricity prices in competitive electricity markets, the uncertain carbon prices, and the increasing energy prices have forced power investors and government policy-makers to search for, and use, more sophisticated methods for project evaluations. The objective of this paper is to present a computer model currently developed by the International Energy Agency (IEA) to quantify the impacts of climate

This paper uses a real options approach (ROA) for analysing the effects of government climate policy uncertainty on private investors’ decision-making in the power sector. It presents an analysis undertaken by the International Energy Agency (IEA) that implements ROA within a dynamic programming approach for technology investment choice. Case studies for gas, coal and nuclear power investment are undertaken with the model. Illustrative results from the model indicate four broad conclusions: i) climate change policy risks can become large if there is only a short time between a future climate policy event such as post-2012 and the time when the investment decision is being made; ii) the way in which CO2 and fuel price variations feed through to electricity price variations is an important determinant of the overall investment risk that companies will face; iii) investment risks vary according to the technology being considered, with nuclear power appearing to be particularly exposed to fuel and CO2 price risks under various assumptions; and iv) the government will be able to reduce investors' risks by implementing long-term (say 10 years) rather than short-term (say 5 years) climate change policy frameworks. Contributions of this study include: (1) having created a step function with stochastic volume of jump at a particular time to simulate carbon price shock under a particular climate policy event; (2) quantifying the implicit risk premium of carbon price uncertainty to investors in new capacity; (3) evaluating carbon price risk alongside energy price risk in investment decision-making; and (4) demonstrating ROA to be a useful tool to quantify the impacts of climate change policy uncertainty on power investment.