The costs of decarbonisation

The following draft report is written on behalf of Summerleaze Ltd (backers of C4CS). The initial purpose was as a supporting document to a submission to an enquiry by the Commons Select Committee on Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). But it has a separate life, to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of C4CS's Future Scenarios model. As such, it will hopefully be updated and expanded sporadically to consider alternative scenarios and as capabilities are added to the model.

The first version considered variations on one decarbonisation scenario that seemed to be the political focus for 2030 at the time: the partial electrification of heat and transport combined with further decarbonisation of electricity generation.

The latest version of the report is available to download as a 30MB PDF by clicking on the button below.

Download PDF version of report

The model can be accessed freely at the time of writing at https://ed.c4cs.org.uk/edfutscen. If you scroll to the bottom, there is a button to load a scenario. If you click on the following button, you can download (as a JSON file) the default version of the scenario explored in Section 3, for loading into the model and trying your own variations.

Download JSON file of default scenario for Section 3

Table of Contents

1. Introduction – Our Experience
   1. Context
   2. Pre-privatisation
   3. The Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation (NFFO)
   4. The Renewables Obligation (RO)
   5. Contracts for Differences (CfDs)
   6. Renewable electricity entrepreneurs – quo vadis
   7. Anaerobic Digestion (AD)
   8. Renewable heat
   9. Renewable hydrogen
   10. Lessons
   11. A model to end all models
2. Design
   1. Granularity
   2. Seed Data and Assumptions
      1. The need for seed data
      2. Weather
      3. Energy supply and demand (human behaviour)
      4. Costs
      5. Operational assumptions
      6. Carbon
      7. Demand-side management
      8. Other elements
3. Electrification
   1. Introduction
   2. Inputs
   3. Outputs
      1. Retail electricity demand (2017 base vs this scenario)
      2. Retail electricity demand profile
      3. Wholesale electricity demand profile
      4. Wholesale demand profile vs output from inflexible generators
      5. Wholesale demand net of inflexible generation
      6. Electricity storage flows and level of charge
      7. Electricity supply and demand by type
      8. Electricity supply and demand by source
      9. Electricity supply margin
      10. Electricity generation capacity utilisation (load factors)
      11. Carbon
      12. Cost
   4. Sensitivities
      1. Random temporal variation
      2. Weather variation
      3. Increasing resilience, reducing demand-shedding
      4. Pushing on towards Net Zero
         1. Key sensitivities beyond 2030
         2. Co-variants
         3. Technologies not considered
         4. Electrifying 50% of heat
         5. Electrifying 75% of road and rail transport
         6. Eliminating fossil fuels from electricity generation
         7. Replacing fossil fuels in electricity generation
         8. Switching from gas/oil to biomass/biogas generation
         9. Switching from gas/oil to nuclear
         10. Switching from gas/oil to more wind/solar
         11. Energy efficiency
         12. Rebuild with district heating and multiple heat sources
4. Conclusion