Impact of sufficiency in industry on the Belgian energy system in 2050

Details

Supervisors

Jeanmart, Hervé

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil mécanicien, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

While a significant downward trend in greenhouse gas emissions from the Belgian industrial sector was observed until around 2012, they have been stagnating for the last decade. It seems that the easiest efficiency measures have already been leveraged in most industries. Breakthrough technologies could lower the emissions further, but they come with a high level of uncertainty, and they may not suffice to reach net carbon neutrality by 2050. Another strategy, that is gaining in attention, is to decrease production volumes, directly decreasing emissions and allowing a more rapid transition. This approach is based on sufficiency, aiming at redefining our material needs in order to meet the social foundations for every individual, without collectively overshooting Earth's planetary boundaries. In this master thesis, a scenario is built for the Belgian industry in 2050 with ambitious assumptions regarding sufficiency, based on previous work in the residential, tertiary and transportation sectors. The global Belgian scenario, including all sectors, is compared with different existing global Belgian scenarios towards 2050 with varying sufficiency ambitions, leading to varying energy demand. All the scenarios are then modeled using EnergyScope Typical Days, which optimises the design and operation of all energy sectors. The results are compared with the energy systems from the original scenarios, and the impact of demand reduction on the energy system is studied, with a focus on the industrial sector. It was observed that as the lower demand scenarios have the main advantage of relying less on uncertain and expensive imported e-fuels, their higher shares of intermittent renewable electricity generation from wind and solar are a real challenge for the operation of the energy system. On top of storage technologies, flexibility in the industrial sector was identified as a promising way to overcome this challenge.