The effects of climate change are already evident in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Impacts range from increased droughts and floods to shifting hurricane patterns. Climate change has impacted the health of the region's ecosystems and the livelihoods of millions of people (WMO, 2021). The mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a critical component of combating such effects (IDB & DDP-LAC, 2019; World Bank Group, 2020). The energy sector – including electricity, industry, and transport – accounts for about 44% of GHG emissions in the region (Vergara et al., 2019). A transformation towards zero and low-carbon technologies in these sectors is crucial to enable decarbonization. Beyond that, this transformation will unlock the benefits of more sustainable energy and transport systems (e.g., health improvements, cost reductions, job creation, reduced congestion, lower number of accidents, etc.). This project will address various regional key challenges for the energy transition. We will develop an open data, open source model of the energy sector of LAC to assess sectoral decarbonization pathways to help reach regional and national net zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions goals by 2050. The model will be built on the Open-Source energy MOdelling SYStem (OSeMOSYS) platform (Howells et al., 2011). It will used as starting point for the OSeMOSYS Global tool – an application of OSeMOSYS recently published in Nature (Barnes et al., 2022) – and the bottom-up LAC (BULAC) model recently produced to study the role of natural gas in the electricity sector in the region [a study produced for United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP, 2022)]. These two existing tools (OSeMOSYS Global and BULAC) focus on modelling the electricity sector and its data serves as key inputs. We will incorporate the transport sector using open and accessible data sources. The expanded model will then be used to study the integrated electricity-transport system and identify synergies between these sectors. The energy consumption in industry and other sectors will be included to holistically analyze decarbonization pathways for the LAC region.
Ingeniero eléctrico con énfasis en sistemas de potencia
