ViewpointFuture energy and emissions policy scenarios in Ireland for private car transport
Highlights
► Private car policy scenarios for Ireland modelled. ► Impact of vehicle efficiency, fuel switching and behavioural measures evaluated. ► Highlights distance to EU non-ETS emissions and renewable energy targets. ► Analysis of EV target shows that GHG mitigation potential is very sensitive.
Introduction
There is a significant and escalating push from within the European Union to improve private car energy efficiency and emissions performance. This is in part due to lower than anticipated recent efficiency gains along with increasingly urgent goals for greenhouse gas abatement. In some EU Member States, efficiency savings from technology improvements have been negated by other parallel trends. In Ireland for example, purchasing trends towards larger cars have offset savings (Ó Gallachóir et al., 2009). Moreover, the availability and affordability of efficient and alternatively fuelled vehicles (AFV) have made the sustainability of personal transport through private cars technologically feasible (Johansson, 2009, Thomas, 2009).
At a Member State level, changes in the private car stock over the period to 2020 can be consistent with meeting goals of energy security and competitiveness, with meeting EU emissions reduction targets and with meeting mandatory minimum shares of renewable energy consumption in transport. In Ireland, private cars account for 14.2% of primary energy demand and are almost entirely fuelled by imported fossil oil (SEAI, 2011). Several policy measures specifically targeting the vehicle stock have been put into place, for example a target of 10% stock electrification for 2020, but the pathways for meeting energy and climate targets are as yet unclear, are the contributions from individual measures towards meeting the overall goals.
Basing potentially expensive, technologically oriented policy measures on sound, fact-based analysis is very important for governments facing economic and climate constraints. The question of whether “efficient is sufficient” is a critical question, or if mobility management is needed in order to successfully decarbonise passenger transport (Hickman and Banister, 2007). Any investment into AFV will require investment into refuelling infrastructure, which will create a technology lock-in situation, making it difficult to switch technology paths in the future. The concept of path dependency explains how the decisions available in the future will be limited by the decisions taken in the present (Åhman and Nilsson, 2008). Indeed, the fundamental problem at hand is the lock-in to fossil fuel use and the internal combustion engine.
This paper addresses a number of these issues in a quantitative manner and its purpose is to improve the knowledge-base and modelling capacity underpinning policy decision making in Ireland. Ireland is an interesting case study, having witnessed dramatic levels of growth in private car transport energy demand and related emissions, while also having had some success in implementing policies to address the growth (Rogan et al., 2011). While the focus is on Ireland, the methodology is readily applicable in other countries where similar data are available. We use a technological model of Ireland's future car stock to simulate the impact of a range of policy measures on the baseline trend in energy demand in the period to 2030. The policies and measures modelled are meeting deployment targets of electric vehicles (EV) and compressed natural gas vehicles (CNGV); a regulation for the improvement of vehicle efficiency; the implementation of a biofuel obligation, as well as several behavioural measures (encouraging modal shifting and reduced travel demand). The significance of the measures simulated is measured in terms of their contribution to meeting targets for energy savings, renewable energy penetration and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions. The paper provides the first robust assessment of the implications of this range of policy measures using a car stock model and considers both the impact of individual measures and the cumulative impact (avoiding double counting).
The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 2 provides the context for the scenarios modelled, providing a brief overview of Ireland's policy, transport and climate targets; Section 3 discusses techno-economic modelling and describes the modelling methodology used in this study, Section 4 presents the results from the scenarios modelled in this paper; Section 5 discusses the implication of results for Ireland, the interplay between technology deployment and mobility management, and drawbacks of the methodology as well as suggestions for refinement and future work. Finally, Section 6 concludes.
Section snippets
Context
There has been an exceptional increase in transport energy demand in Ireland relative to other EU Member States, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of overall energy consumption. Transport in 2008 consumed 5612 ktoe (42.8% of overall final energy demand), an increase of 277% on 1990 demand (which at 2022 ktoe, represented 27.8% of overall final energy demand, SEAI, 2011). Fig. 1 puts these figures in the context of other European counties: in terms of per-capita transport emissions,
Transport techno-economic modelling
Reviews of energy modelling techniques are found in Swan and Ugursal (2009) and Jebaraj and Iniyan (2006). They identify two distinct approaches to energy modelling: top-down and bottom-up. The top-down approach tends to aggregate end-use technologies and forecast energy efficiency on the basis of historical patterns, while total activity or service demand (for example, residential heating or passenger kilometres) is modelled using regression on the basis of economic indicators, such as income
Results
In this section we present the scenario analysis results. First the energy savings by policy scenario are summarised; the contribution to specific policy targets is then presented, with specific focus on energy efficiency, renewable energy and CO2 emissions. Finally, a more in-depth analysis of the 10% electric vehicle target is presented.
Climate mitigation targets
In Ireland, non-ETS emissions must be reduced by 1.29% annually between 2009 and 2020 in order to reach the 20% reduction target. Private car emissions, currently representing 12% of non-ETS emissions, as modelled can achieve reductions of 2.8% per annum if all technological and behavioural measures simulated in this paper are fully implemented and successful: this includes an end to the growth in private car travel and a 10% penetration of EVs and of CNGVs by 2020. Assuming that travel demand
Conclusion
From a planning perspective, ambitious goals for renewable energy growth and GHG emissions reductions exist for Ireland, but it is as yet unclear how precisely these targets will be achieved at a sectoral level and what the impact of individual policy measures will be. This paper approaches this issue focussing on private car transport, responsible for 13.5% of Ireland's energy demand, and the technological options available for mitigating emissions. The results show a wide variety of possible
Acknowledgement
This research was funded under an EMBARK research grant of the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology.
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