Abstract
Denmark is in the midst of a fundamental transition towards a low carbon economy. The agreed-upon policy states that this transition should be completed by the year 2050, while the recently formed Danish government is aiming for a 70 % CO2{reduction by 2030. Such a fundamental transition will have repercussions throughout the broader economy. It is hence necessary to have modeling tools capable of providing insights into both what is economically viable and technically feasible. Contributing to the development of such a model has been the object of this thesis. The resulting model, named IntERACT, includes a detailed description of the Danish macro economy and the Danish energy system, and not least a novel method for capturing how the two systems interact. This dissertation pursues four research questions. First, how can a national energy system model be constructed to help prioritize and describe optimal socioeconomic pathways to a low-emission society across all sectors? Second, how can a national energy system model and a national computable general equilibrium model be linked to improve the policy decision-making process? Third, what is the potential for meeting Danish energy savings obligations by targeting households' investment behavior? And last, how can the challenge of ex-ante evaluation of energy eciency policy for industry sectors be evaluated systematically within a modeling context? The rst principal contribution made by this thesis is the development of the linking method; and the implementation of this technique into the IntERACT model. The thesis further demonstrates how the IntERACT model makes it possible to capture the macroeconomic eect of fuel and technology-specic measures within the energy system, with a hitherto unseen degree of consistency. The second principal contribution of this thesis is in demonstrating how the IntERACT model facilitates the ex-ante evaluation of energy eciency policies.
Info
Thesis PhD, 2019
UN SDG Classification
DK Main Research Area
Science/Technology
