TRIAS - Sustainability Impact Assessment of Strategies Integrating Transport, Technology and Energy Scenarios
Overview
Background & policy context:
Mobility is becoming more and more important in today's life. This is reflected by European citizens continuously increasing their travel demand or by the employment opportunities generated by transport, for example the 7.5 million people employed in the transport service sector of the EU-25. The downside of this development becomes obvious when looking at the growing proportion of transport emissions against total human greenhouse gas emissions, which is almost 30% today, and the almost total dependence of transport on fossil fuels as an energy source.
Given this framework, the requirement for changes in the transport system became obvious. Both behavioural and technological changes will be necessary to alter the harmful trends and make transport sustainable, delivering support to social development and providing fairness, economic growth and environmental stability.
A major step in making the transport system more sustainable would be a shift towards alternative fuels like biofuels or hydrogen generated from various sources. This requires a symbiotic transition of the transport-energy system towards the supply and use of such alternative fuels. Scenarios for such a matched transition process were developed and assessed by the TRIAS project. The focus of TRIAS was to provide an integrated and quantitative assessment of the transport-energy system adaptations and their economic, social and environmental impacts.
Objectives:
The strategic objectives of TRIAS were four-fold:
- Develop and test strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and noxious emissions from transport based on the trilogy ('trias') of transport, technology and energy scenarios. In particular, the introduction of biofuels and hydrogen as energy carriers for transport are analysed.
- Base the assessment on an integrated model-based approach looking at environmental, economic and social impacts (sustainability impact assessment). The use of integrated models enables quantifying the impacts of scenarios, deriving new sustainability indicators from the quantitative model variables and creating consistent scenarios where all the numbers fit together avoiding contradictions within a scenario. The four models applied are POLES (world-energy system), ASTRA (economy-transport-environment interaction), VACLAV (transport network impacts), Regio-SUSTAIN (regional environmental impacts).
- Provide an open field for both external scenarios and scenarios developed within TRIAS, by reviewing the scenario literature and providing interaction with stakeholders concerning scenario design.
- Consider the life-cycle implications of all strategies investigated. For example, the use of biofuels or hydrogen has underlying restrictions on the available land to produce biomass, so that for each technology path tested its full life cycle has to be considered.
Methodology:
The TRIAS project commenced with an analysis of available scenarios from existing studies. Based on this knowledge the TRIAS scenarios were developed and these were analysed in a final step.
A second starting point was the development of a technology database that provided the techno-economic data for alternative technologies related to biofuel and hydrogen use for transport. These data were required to update the applied models so that they disposed over the capabilities to simulate the technology diffusion and transition as part of the scenarios.
The four models, POLES, ASTRA, VACLAV and Regio-SUSTAIN, were upgraded to:
- Incorporate the new technologies;
- Extend their assessment capabilities;
- Provide linkages between the models. Models then calculated scenarios until the year 2030, with an outlook until 2050 by POLES and ASTRA.
The scenario results were provided on a detailed level consisting of both the single indicators of the various models (e.g. presenting results, for either a country or region, at a sectoral level) and the aggregate indicators relevant to describe sustainability of the scenarios.
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