Technology comes to life through innovation, timely investments and policy incentives
- Jean-Francois Mercure
Computational models provide unparalleled insight into current and future demand for water, land and energy, and the impact these demands have on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the environment. What if we could also take into account the fast pace at which new technologies are evolving? This is the aim of a new project in the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR) in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy.
Dr Jean-Francois Mercure, who leads the research, asserts that building this factor into models will help understanding of the degree to which improvements in energy-consuming technologies and their adoption can help governments reduce emissions: “Technology comes to life through innovation, timely investments and policy incentives, and so it’s important to include technology diffusion and its pace in energy modelling.
“However, this is challenging and most models today attempt to calculate cost-optimal technology roadmaps based on current technology, which is not necessarily likely to happen, and which disregard the process by which new technology regimes come to existence, but also how old technologies endure.”
Technological change occurs constantly, either following innovations in industrial systems or through evolutions of behaviours, such as in the adoption of electric cars. Earlier this year, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Mercure began work on a computational modelling system that takes into account the profile of technology transitions in the past to project how new transitions could arise in the future.
To do so, he is collaborating with environmental scientists at the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia and at the Open University, policy advisors and researchers at the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change and the Committee for Climate Change, and applied economists at Cambridge Econometrics.
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Image: Car2Go Electric Car Sharing
Credit: Paul Krueger
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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