Energy economics articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The increase of intermittent energy sources and renewable energy penetration generally results in reduced overall inertia, making power systems susceptible to disturbances. Here, authors develop an AI-based method to estimate inertia in real-time and test its performance on a heterogeneous power network.

    • Daniele Linaro
    • , Federico Bizzarri
    •  & Angelo M. Brambilla

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Charging costs are important for the diffusion of electric vehicles as required to decarbonize transport. Here, the authors show large variance of electrical vehicle charging costs across 30 European countries and charging options, suggesting different policy options to reduce charging costs.

    • Lukas Lanz
    • , Bessie Noll
    •  & Bjarne Steffen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study indicates that approximately 5.8 TW of wind and solar photovoltaic capacity would be required to achieve carbon neutrality in China’s power system by 2050. The electricity supply costs would increase by 19.9% or 9.6 CNY¢/kWh.

    • Zhenyu Zhuo
    • , Ershun Du
    •  & Chongqing Kang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reversible Power-to-Gas systems can convert electricity to hydrogen at times of ample and inexpensive power supply and operate in reverse to deliver electricity during times when power is relatively scarce. Here, the authors show that such systems can already be economically viable relative to current hydrogen prices in the context of the German and Texas electricity markets.

    • Gunther Glenk
    •  & Stefan Reichelstein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Despite global initiatives to reach net-zero CO2 emissions, the tradeoffs of energy systems to reach that goal remain understudied. Here the authors analyze all net-zero scenarios used for the 2018 IPCC report and quantify the role of renewable energy, fuels, and emissions in attaining a zero CO2 world.

    • Julianne DeAngelo
    • , Inês Azevedo
    •  & Steven J. Davis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    COVID-19 has decreased power sector emissions globally and in the United States. Here the authors assess whether such reductions would have occurred in the United States in the absence of the pandemic, as well as the potential impact of COVID-19 on coal-fired power plant retirements through 2022.

    • Max Luke
    • , Priyanshi Somani
    •  & Stephen J. Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Established climate mitigation modelling relies on controversial negative emissions and unprecedented technological change, but neglects to consider degrowth scenarios. Here the authors show that degrowth scenarios minimize many key risks for feasibility and sustainability and thus need to be thoroughly assessed.

    • Lorenz T. Keyßer
    •  & Manfred Lenzen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global energy transformation requires quantifying the "price of energy" and studying its evolution. Here the authors present a predictive framework that calculates the average US price of energy, estimating future energy demands for up to four years with excellent accuracy, designing and optimizing energy and monetary policies.

    • Stefanos G. Baratsas
    • , Alexander M. Niziolek
    •  & Efstratios N. Pistikopoulos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The allocation of remaining fossil fuel production has stimulated a discussion around issues of equitable allocation but the implications of different options are unclear. Here the authors show that shifting production to low-medium human development regions has limited economic benefits under strong climate policy.

    • Steve Pye
    • , Siân Bradley
    •  & Paul Ekins

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Computable General Equilibrium models can hardly decouple economic growth and energy consumption while energy system models can hardly predict macroeconomic implications of energy system changes. Here the authors investigated the macroeconomic implications of consistently dealing with energy systems and the stability of further power generation and show that GDP losses were significantly lower than those in the conventional economic model by more than 50% in 2050, while industry and service sector energy consumption are the main factors causing these differences.

    • Shinichiro Fujimori
    • , Ken Oshiro
    •  & Tomoko Hasegawa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Future energy demand maybe induced by climate change and subject to uncertainties arising from different extent of climate change and socioeconomic development. Here the authors follow a top-down approach and combined the recently developed socio-economic and climate scenarios and found that across 210 scenarios, moderate warming increases global climate-exposed energy demand before adaptation by 25–58% between 2010 and 2050.

    • Bas J. van Ruijven
    • , Enrica De Cian
    •  & Ian Sue Wing

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is important to examine the economic viability of battery storage investments. Here the authors introduced the Levelized Cost of Energy Storage metric to estimate the breakeven cost for energy storage and found that behind-the-meter storage installations will be financially advantageous in both Germany and California.

    • Stephen Comello
    •  & Stefan Reichelstein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The technical and economic viability of renewable energy (RE) based energy system is understudied. Here the authors utilized a LUT Energy System Transition Model to indicate that a carbon neutral electricity system can be built in all global regions in an economically feasible way but requires evolutionary changes for the following 35 years.

    • Dmitrii Bogdanov
    • , Javier Farfan
    •  & Christian Breyer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Carbon budget is diminishing to comply with the target under 2 °C scenario. Facing the limited capacity to improve energy efficiency, the authors show that steelmaking with inherent decarbonisation process can potentially help achieve 2050 emission reduction targets under 2 °C scenario before 2030.

    • Sicong Tian
    • , Jianguo Jiang
    •  & Vasilije Manovic

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Quantifying burden on hydropower units for balancing variable renewable energy sources has been uncertain and difficult. Herein Yang et al. propose a framework and characterize the burden, performance and compensation of hydropower regulation of renewable power systems.

    • Weijia Yang
    • , Per Norrlund
    •  & Urban Lundin

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