Title: A medium-term energy and GHG emissions cost analysis for electricity and water sector in Abu Dhabi

Authors: Subhash Kumar

Addresses: Institute for Future Energy Consumer Needs and Behavior (FCN), School of Business and Economics/E.ON Energy Research Center, RWTH Aachen University, Mathieustraβe 10, 52074 Aachen, Germany

Abstract: Energy security and GHG mitigation are hot topic nowadays in the world community. Due to international pressure to reduce these greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining the sustainable economic growth is a difficult task for most of the countries. The UAE and Abu Dhabi has one of the highest ecological footprint per capita in the world therefore, an urgent need to think over it. The transition towards clean energy production and retrofitting old fossil fuel plants need a lot of investment. This paper develops business as usual with various emission reduction scenarios and compares all the alternative scenarios in term of costs with respect to reference scenario. LEAP energy model is used to estimate the cost of energy and GHG emissions in these scenarios. The results show that the water standard demand policies are emitting lowest CO2 as well as lowest cost among all the scenarios.

Keywords: electricity generation; water production; Abu Dhabi; CO2; carbon dioxide; carbon emissions; GHG emissions; greenhouse gases; emission costs; cost-benefit analysis; long-range energy alternatives planning; LEAP; medium-term; energy costs; energy security; water demand.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEPDM.2015.074730

International Journal of Environmental Policy and Decision Making, 2015 Vol.1 No.4, pp.332 - 349

Received: 25 Mar 2015
Accepted: 17 Jul 2015

Published online: 16 Feb 2016 *

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