Search

The decarbonisation of electricity supply poses a major milestone in the mitigation of climate change. Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) provide a relevant instrument for the quantification and comparison of the economic and environmental impacts of various electricity decarbonisation scenarios, despite having rarely been applied to a national context. In this paper, an IAM able to calculate such impacts on the electricity sector in Spain is presented. Developed using the latest IAM modelling literature, the proposed model is able to estimate changes in temperature, climate-induced economic losses, and investment needs for climate mitigation corresponding to a range of electricity decarbonisation scenarios on a time horizon to 2050. The findings show that scenarios that undertake deeper and earlier cuts in CO2 emissions from electricity generation would achieve better welfare results, and that further reliance on fossil fuels would imply higher costs than the investment needed for renewable energy deployment in Spain. The findings constitute an insight towards the formulation of policies that address the decarbonisation of the Spanish electricity supply.

Tesis doctoral que aborda las externalidades medioambientales negativas como elemento a integrar dentro del paradigma económico, ofreciendo cuatro estudios interconectados sobre la inclusión de dichas externalidades en distintos contextos socioeconómicos, utilizando metodologías tanto cuantitativas como cualitativas. La tesis doctoral parte de la premisa de que nos encontramos en un momento fundamental en lucha contra el cambio climático, en el cual las políticas públicas de reducción de emisiones y transición a la neutralidad climática en Europa deben dar un salto cualitativo para contener los efectos más adversos del cambio climático.

Modelo de Análisis Integrado (IAM) en formato Excel que cubre el período 2010 a 2050 en diversos escenarios de descarbonización del sistema eléctrico español, permitiendo comparar los costes medioambientales y económicos de cada uno de ellos.

The use of natural resources as an input to economic growth and the interactions between economic and ecological systems have resulted in an accumulation of environmental externalities. This accumulation can negatively afect future levels of welfare and economic growth. In this paper, such dynamics are assessed and quantifed by introducing explicit environmental externality variables in a production function. This is performed in an endogenous growth model where cumulative environmental externalities interact with economic growth. Using efciency analysis, a dynamic econometric model is estimated showing the signifcance of a negative infuence of past levels of use of natural resources on GDP over a broad range of stochastic frontier analysis estimations. The results are applied to propose an alternative specifcation to the production function of a modelling tool used by the European Commission for the assessment of climate policies in the European Union. The fndings show that observed GDP is overestimated when environmental externalities are not considered.