Abstract
This report is the final report of the project Transition to Sustainable Energy Services in Northern Europe (TRANSES). The main objective of TRANSES has been to outline and evaluate likely technology portfolios, deployment paths and policy options to meet future energy service needs in a cost-effective and sustainable manner in a liberalized energy market environment, to create an international arena for dissemination of results, dialogue and exchange of ideas in order to gain a swifter transition to sustainable energy services and to establish long-term scientific cooperation between the institutions involved.
Two major scientific tracks have been followed in parallel during the project: A techno-economic optimisation and analysis of the Nordic energy system with large computer models like EMPS and MARKAL, and a detailed study of energy demand and demand forecasting in Norway. A multi-attribute trade-off analysis performed on 1.152 scenarios for the Nordic energy system in the period 2005-2034 shows that strategies containing a lot of biomass and biofuel/hybrid vehicles, large amounts of new hydropower, wind power and nuclear capacity perform best in the cost-emission space and are most robust with respect to uncertain futures of demand, fuel prices and emissions taxes.
Two separate rounds of energy demand forecasts with slightly different assumptions gave the same principal result: Efforts aiming to shift energy consumption to more thermal carriers like district heating, biomass and gas will reduce the demand for electricity but will cause total energy demand measured as delivered energy to increase since thermal energy conversion equipment has higher losses than electrical equipment. If the effort is directed towards energy efficiency measures and low energy buildings, however, total energy demand will be reduced.
Two major scientific tracks have been followed in parallel during the project: A techno-economic optimisation and analysis of the Nordic energy system with large computer models like EMPS and MARKAL, and a detailed study of energy demand and demand forecasting in Norway. A multi-attribute trade-off analysis performed on 1.152 scenarios for the Nordic energy system in the period 2005-2034 shows that strategies containing a lot of biomass and biofuel/hybrid vehicles, large amounts of new hydropower, wind power and nuclear capacity perform best in the cost-emission space and are most robust with respect to uncertain futures of demand, fuel prices and emissions taxes.
Two separate rounds of energy demand forecasts with slightly different assumptions gave the same principal result: Efforts aiming to shift energy consumption to more thermal carriers like district heating, biomass and gas will reduce the demand for electricity but will cause total energy demand measured as delivered energy to increase since thermal energy conversion equipment has higher losses than electrical equipment. If the effort is directed towards energy efficiency measures and low energy buildings, however, total energy demand will be reduced.
