Uncertainty in future costs of key CO2 abatement technologies: A sensitivity analysis for the global CGE model DART

Deep emission cuts rely on the use of low carbon technologies like renewable energy or carbon capture and storage (CCS). There is considerable uncertainty about their (future) cost. In this paper, we carry out a sensitivity analysis based on Gauss Quadrature on cost parameters describing these technologies. We find that this uncertainty does matter to some extend for the composition of the future energy system, but changes in marginal or total abatement costs are relatively small. The impact of uncertainty varies however with the ambition of emission reduction. For deeper emission cuts, marginal costs are less affected but consumption changes are larger than for medium ambition reduction targets. For the global level, effects often average out, but different regions are affected quite differently from the underlying uncertainty in cost for key abatement technologies.