ROSE project: energy mix…wow! Nuclear not needed?

I ran into “Roadmaps towards sustainable energy futures”-project. It is a german funded project which has created a set of different scenarios for IAM simulations. They describe themselves:

“The Roadmaps towards Sustainable Energy futures (RoSE) project aims to provide a robust picture on energy sector transformation scenarios for reaching ambitious climate targets. A broad and systematic exploration of decarbonization scenarios for the energy system is indispensable for better understanding the prospects of achieving long-tern climate protection targets. RoSE is assessing the feasibility and costs of climate mitigation goals across different models, different policy regimes, and different reference assumptions relating to future population growth, economic development and fossil fuel availability, in order to provide vital insights into the overarching policy question: What are robust roadmaps for achieving a sustainable global energy future?”

Now I am not really a big fun of these modelling games since one tends to get out whatever one puts in and I have had a feeling that not all modellers model carefully enough. See my earlier post on this… However, ROSE-project has a database for the modelling results and let me just show what the 450ppm medium growth, medium population growth, and medium convergence scenarios ROSE211 give for the primary energy supply. I show bioenergy, non-bio renewables, and nuclear.

Insane amounts of bioenergy in all except IPAC

non-bio RE grows a lot. REMIND model extreme is this.

Wow! Colossal increase in nuclear generation from todays abut 10EJ/year. In REMIND reductions in the 2nd half of the century…for silly reasons.

See how two of the models actually see about 20-fold increase in nuclear generation. In those model scenarios capacity growth in the 2nd half of the century seems to be more than 100 GW/year (probably unrealistic). If I understood correctly REMIND model is a german model and even that sees dramatic increase in nuclear power until about 2060 after which it declines. They got this result by forcing it down by declaring world runs out of uranium at this time. This is an assumption other presumably considered silly, but which does have the benefit of creating a safe-space for german IAM modellers. I find it curious to observe the disconnect between the modelling results and how they are communicated in public.