Energy demand/Policy issues

	HasDescription	File	HasReference
Apply emission and energy intensity standards	Apply emission intensity standards for e.g. cars (gCO2/km), power plants (gCO2/kWh) or appliances (kWh/hour).
Carbon tax	A tax on carbon leads to higher prices for carbon intensive fuels (such as fossil fuels), making low-carbon alternatives more attractive.
Change market shares of fuel types	Exogenously set the market shares of certain fuel types. This can be done for specific analyses or scenarios to explore the broader implications of increasing the use of, for instance, biofuels, electricity or hydrogen and reflects the impact of fuel targets.		Van Ruijven et al., 2007
Improving energy efficiency	Exogenously set improvement in efficiency. Such improvements can be introduced for the submodels that focus on particular technologies, for example, in transport, heavy industry and households submodels.
Provision on improved stoves for traditional bio-energy	Increases the efficiency of bio-energy use.
Subsidies on modern energy	Reduces the costs of modern energy to reduce traditional energy use (can be targeted to low income groups).

Example of Policy Interventions

An example of several of these interventions forms the study “Resource Efficiency”. Here, the TIMER model was used to explore the impact of radically improving energy efficiency. This, for instance, included the information of best-available technologies in iron and steel production and other industries, the implementation of the most efficient cars and aircraft is assumed, a moderate shift is assumed from aircraft to high speed trains,and building of highly efficient housing (mostly insulation measures). It was also assumed that new power plants would be based on best-available technologies. New plants in all regions are assumed to be built on the basis of efficient technologies. The measures assumed in this global energy efficiency scenario are able to considerably reduce energy use. Primary energy consumption is reduced from X to Y EJ/yr (primary energy) in 2050, which corresponds to a reduction by about 30% as compared to the baseline. The results show that the RE scenario is able to more-or-less half the gap between baseline CO2 emissions and the emission reductions required to restrict temperature increase - with a high degree of probability - to a maximum of 2°C.

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