MANIFEST
MechANisms and actors of Feasible Energy Transitions: MANIFEST will develop a new scientific understanding of the feasibility to decarbonize the electricity sector focusing on both launching low-carbon electricity in developing countries and sustaining the growth of renewable electricity already in place in front-runner countries.
Technologies needed to decarbonize the electricity system are already commercially available. And there are mathematical models of how these technologies can be deployed sufficiently fast and at a large enough scale to displace fossil fuels and meet climate targets. Yet there is no scientific method to evaluate whether these scenarios are feasible in the real world, given the socio-political and technological constraints in different countries and regions.
The main scholarly approach to assess whether something is feasible in the real world is to look at whether anything similar happened in the past. But for climate change this runs into a problem because both the challenge and what we need to do are unprecedented so there are no direct historical analogues. Thus, analysing the feasibility of successful climate change mitigation may scientifically seem to be at a dead end. I overcome this stalemate by looking at the past and ongoing climate actions through a particular social science lens called ‘causal mechanisms’.
My hypothesis is that while a lot of things are changing (e.g. clean technologies are becoming cheaper, population and energy demand grow), the political, economic and social mechanisms that shape our capacity to act on climate are the same. By understanding these mechanisms through empirically observing the past we hope to be able to predict what is and is not possible to do in the future.
MANIFEST is led by Jessica Jewell.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Starting Grant agreement No. 950408).
Publications related to MANIFEST project
M. Suzuki, J. Jewell & A. Cherp. (2023). Have climate policies accelerated energy transitions? Historical evolution of electricity mix in the G7 and the EU compared to net-zero targets. Energy Research & Social Science. Open Access. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2023.103281
V. Vinichenko, J. Jewell, J. Jacobsson, A. Cherp. (2023). Historical diffusion of nuclear, wind and solar power in different national contexts: implications for climate mitigation pathways. Environmental Research Letters. Open Access. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acf47a
J. Jewell & A. Cherp. (2023). The feasibility of climate action: Bridging the inside and the outside view through feasibility spaces. WIREs Climate Change. DOI: https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.838
M. Hyun, A. Cherp, J. Jewell, Y. J. Kim & J. Eom. (2023). Feasibility trade-offs in decarbonisation of power sector with high coal dependence: A case of Korea. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition. Open Access. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rset.2023.100050
V. Vinichenko, M. Vetier, J. Jewell, L. Nacke & A. Cherp. (2023). Phasing out coal for 2 °C target requires worldwide replication of most ambitious national plans despite security and fairness concerns. Environmental Research Letters. Open Access. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acadf6
A. Cherp, V. Vinichenko, J. Tosun, J. Gordon & J. Jewell. (2021). National growth dynamics of wind and solar power compared to the growth required for global climate targets. Nature Energy. Gated. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00863-0. Free SharedIt link (view only) code on GitHub: https://github.com/poletresearch/RES_article.
Commentary and news related to MANIFEST project
G7 countries and the European Union have committed to decarbonise electricity by 2035. Is this target feasible? We show that it would require expanding low-carbon electricity 4.5 times faster and reducing fossil-based electricity 2 times faster than in 2015-2020 between 2020 and 2035. Unfortunately in 2021, most G7 countries increased the use of fossils and slowed down the growth of low-carbon electricity, making it even more challenging to achieve the target by 2035.
Two post-doc positions on the dynamics of energy transitions at Chalmers University. One focuses on the economics and speed of energy transitions and the other on the diffusion and growth of technologies and infrastructures. Selection ongoing, we start reviewing applications August 29th, 2022.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has massively disrupted global and European energy markets. While most of the attention has focused on the EU’s dependence on Russian gas and oil supplies, Russia is also at the center of global nuclear power. The current crisis could lead to shifts in supplies of nuclear technologies which reverberate for decades to come.
Last week, the EU announced a target to be free of Russian fossil fuels by 2030. As European countries face this goal, two questions arise: (1) Is it sufficiently ambitious and realistic? and (2) Will this support or compromise our climate objectives?
The IEA’s latest World Energy Outlook refreshes sophisticated scenarios that project the future growth of solar PV. Here, I investigate if we can match their predictions by fitting an S-curve to historical growth data.
The IEA Net Zero 2050 Roadmap envisions adding 310 GW of onshore wind in 2030. This is the same as was added globally in the last five years. Has such a rate been ever achieved in any country?
New PhD position analyzing climate targets and energy choices in different countries based at Chalmers University. Apply by May 21st.
Renewable power capacity additions in China often attract widespread attention for their sheer magnitude. But how useful are these raw numbers without considering the size of the country? Using installed capacity per capita and renewables’ share of national electricity production as illustrative examples, I make a case for normalising data when making inter-country comparisons. In addition to offering richer insights into the pace and extent of energy transitions, such analyses allow for a more nuanced view of change, help contextualise progress and set more realistic expectations.