Strategies for the South European energy sector for the next 40 years

Abstract: This paper discusses the development of an energy systems model for the southern countries of Europe. More precisely, for three main actors of the South of the European Union: Spain, Italy and Portugal. The three of them are currently facing economic difficulties due to the world financial crisis. To satisfy their energy demand at the less cost-effective price and following the EU policies in terms of greenhouse emissions requires a deep analysis of the current situation and an accurate forecast for the upcoming years. There are several EU (EU 20/20/20, treaty of Lisbon and EU ETS) and UN (Kyoto Protocol) policies that are taken into account in the model to build the most realistic scenarios that can happen in the three countries in the following years. This paper is based on the electricity consumption coming from the residential, industrial and commercial sectors. The model is developed in the open source program OSINDA (OSeMOSYS with INterface and DAtabase). It considers different possible scenarios for the three countries from 2010 to 2050 and asses the paths to follow in terms of infrastructure investments for the upcoming years. The baseline scenario takes into account the current taxes in CO2 emissions, the current capital, fixed and variable costs and the prices of the imports of fossil fuels. Then, there are plausible futures that analyze different possible scenarios (with the normal uncertainty of the future). The source code and modelling data is publicly available under the intellectual protection of Creative Commons®.