Patrick Criqui, Silvana Mima and Alban Kitous THE EUROPEAN ENERGY SYSTEM AND THE CO2 EMISSIONS MITIGATION POLICIES UP TO 2050 Patrick Criqui: Head of Laboratoire d’Economie de la production et de l’Intégration Internationale – Département Energie et Politiques de l’Environnement, Grenoble, LEPII EPE - UPMF - BP 47 - 38040 Grenoble cedex 9, France, Tel (dir) 33(0)456528573, Tel (stdd) 33(0)456528570, Fax 33(0)456528571, e-mail: patrick.criqui@upmf-grenoble.fr Silvana Mima: Researcher at LEPII-EPE- BP 47 - 38040 Grenoble cedex 9, France, Tel : +33(0)456528589, e-mail: Silvana.MIMA@upmf-grenoble.fr Alban Kitous - Energy modelling expert at ENERDATA, ENERDATA, 2 Avenue de Vignate, 38610 Gieres, France, Tel : 33(0)476422546, Fax : 33(0)476 516145, e-mail: Alban.Kitous@enerdata.fr Overview The future of energy for Europe will be strongly dependent on the future world energy context which will be dominated by two key issues. The first one will be meeting the growing energy needs of a large part of the world population, mostly in Asia, Africa and South America. The second question is the need for the world energy system to address the major environmental issues raised by the future energy consumption growth, and most especially its impact on anthropogenic climate change. Both issues are key for Europe as on the one hand it will have to face the growing competition for supply by other regions, and on the other hand because it intends to take the lead on climate change mitigation policies. More and more people agree that avoiding climate change will be cheaper than dealing with its effects. “Dealing with climate change is an imperative for today, not an option for tomorrow” (Beckett, 20061). To meet the goals of the Framework Convention on Climate Change that aims at "stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" (article 2, UNFCCC, 1992), several European countries, recently echoed by the European Commission, are currently proposing that the emissions of industrialized countries be cut to a third or a fourth of their current levels, and that the growth of emissions in the developing countries should be sharply curtailed. The resulting global emissions profiles would then enable GHG concentrations to be stabilized at between 450 and 550 ppmv, which is less than twice the pre-industrial level of 270 ppmv in 1800. In this paper we focus on what GHG emissions mitigation policies mean for the European energy system within a global framework. Methods We carry out a comparative study on the European energy system through 3 scenarios of CO2 emissions mitigations policies up to 2050 with the POLES model. These scenarios are produced by the world energy model POLES that has been used on various national, European and international prospective studies on the energy system. The model allows us carrying out a comprehensive analytical study with a particular focus on Europe within the world energy context. These scenarios are the POLES Reference scenario (see WETO-H2 report (1)), the Stabilisation 450 - Factor 4 scenario, which is in fact a scenario that aims at stabilising world CO2 concentration at 450 ppmv while imposing a “factor 4” reductions for industrialised countries compared to today’s levels, and finally an intermediary Carbon Constraint scenario, which is derived from the WETO-H2 study. We analyse the way the 1 Margaret Beckett « Gleneagles dialogue meeting-Becket opening remarks » 3/10/2006