Speakers: Ferd Crone (PvdA) & Tom Kram (RIVM)
Energy scenarios: what can you do with them? Imagine. You are living in 1900, the industrial revolution has already begun. Steam engines do what slow wind mills used to do and you can drive your car at 40 km/h from A to B, whereas you used to use a smelling horse for this.
You think: ‘We have managed it all quite well.’
IPCC scenarios
First Tom Kram shows the four main energy future possibilities according to IPPC. The scenarios are determined by population growth, economy, technology, amount of energy available and agriculture use.
In the A societies, economic growth should be as high as possible, while in the B societies equity & environment are more important. According to IPCC, these four societies are all possible. The B1 and B2 societies will have less climate change than the other two. However, this is only true in the case of increasing use of low CO2 emission technologies. The function of IPCC scenarios is to warn governments.
Ferd Crone
Ferd Crone mentions that long term scenarios can help indeed to sharpen short term governmental policy. As a expert in liberalisation of the electricity market, he also wonders if the electricity market should be liberalised in the Netherlands. Especially since only a few large electricity producers are left in Europe (oligo market). Due to pressure of the EU, the Netherlands will eventually be forced to liberalise its electricity market anyway. Therefore decent governmental rules are necessary to prevent electricity crises.
Click here to read a report of this meeting (in Dutch).
