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Role of energy efficiency in climate change mitigation policy for India: assessment of co-benefits and opportunities within an integrated assessment modeling framework

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Abstract

Addressing the challenges of global warming requires interventions on both the energy supply and demand side. With the supply side responses being thoroughly discussed in the literature, our paper focuses on analyzing the role of end use efficiency improvements for Indian climate change mitigation policy and the associated co-benefits, within the integrated assessment modeling framework of Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM). Six scenarios are analyzed here in total- one no climate policy and two climate policy cases, and within each of these one scenario with reference end use energy technology assumptions and another with advance end use energy technology assumptions has been analyzed. The paper has some important insights. Final energy demand and emissions in India are significantly reduced with energy efficiency improvements, and the role of this policy is important especially for the building and transportation sector under both reference and climate policy scenarios. Though energy efficiency policy should be an integral part of climate policy, by itself it is not sufficient for achieving mitigation targets, and a climate policy is necessary for achieving mitigation goals. There are significant co-benefits of energy efficiency improvements. Energy security for India is improved with reduced oil, coal and gas imports. Significant reduction in local pollutant gases is found which is important for local health concerns. Capital investment requirement for Indian electricity generation is reduced, more so for the climate policy scenarios, and finally there are significant savings in terms of reduced abatement cost for meeting climate change mitigation goals.

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Notes

  1. Refer Appendix 1 in the supplementary material for details on GCAM framework and GCAM-IIM.

  2. In GCAM, biomass (commercial) and traditional biomass are modeled separately for the buildings sector for cooking service. Only marginal improvement in efficiency of traditional biomass is assumed across the century. As traditional biomass usage in Indian building sector is assumed to decline sharply with income, energy efficiency and climate policy don’t have any significant effect on this fuel in our results. Also, traditional biomass usage in the industrial sector is not considered in our study.

  3. This share is very high compared to the share of industrial energy consumption for OECD countries in 2009, which stands at 22 %. However in per capita terms, India’s industrial energy consumption in 2090 stands at 51 GJ, while for year 2005 the corresponding number was 66 GJ for USA, 51 GJ for Western Europe and 38 GJ for Japan. So our numbers are clearly within the range of industrial energy consumption for OECD countries. Also, as the reviewer has pointed out, it is possible that our assumptions for efficiency improvements in the industrial sector are conservative leading to higher energy share.

  4. Assuming that there is no real price increase, we assume coal price is 43 US$/tce, oil price is 110 US$/boe, and gas price is 10 US$/mmbtu of NG. Refer WEO 2010 (IEA 2010) pg. 212 for coal price and pg. 103 for oil price assumptions. For natural gas price assumptions refer pg. 37 in Jain and Sen (2011).

  5. It should be noted here that additional electricity investments under a climate policy discussed above are a part of the total abatement cost. However abatement cost in GCAM is impacted by the cost of all the technologies including electricity sector technologies, oil refining technologies, hydrogen production technologies, as well as the end use technologies like electric vehicles and efficient lighting technologies which impact the shift towards a low carbon world. As from the perspective of a developing country like India, upfront capital investment cost are a critical issue and lack of funding impedes ramping up of power generation infrastructure, this aspect of co-benefits hence requires special attention and we have discussed it separately.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for research support provided by the Global Technology Strategy Program. The authors acknowledge long-term support for GCAM development from the Integrated Assessment Research Program in the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Vaibhav Chaturvedi

  2. Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Ahmedabad, India

    Priyadarshi R. Shukla

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  1. Vaibhav Chaturvedi
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  2. Priyadarshi R. Shukla
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Correspondence to Vaibhav Chaturvedi.

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This article is part of the Special Issue on “The EMF27 Study on Global Technology and Climate Policy Strategies” edited by John Weyant, Elmar Kriegler, Geoffrey Blanford, Volker Krey, Jae Edmonds, Keywan Riahi, Richard Richels, and Massimo Tavoni.

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Chaturvedi, V., Shukla, P.R. Role of energy efficiency in climate change mitigation policy for India: assessment of co-benefits and opportunities within an integrated assessment modeling framework. Climatic Change 123, 597–609 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0898-x

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