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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has proven its value as an institution for large-scale scientific collaboration to synthesize and assess large volumes of climate research for use by policy-makers, as well as for establishing credibility of findings among diverse national governments. But the IPCC has received considerable criticism of both its substance and process. The new IPCC leadership to be elected in October could help guide the IPCC to a clear, shared understanding of future objectives and could shape procedural reforms. We identify key opportunities for reform by addressing two related questions: Is the IPCC doing the right things? Is the IPCC doing things right?
Even without internationally concerted action on climate change mitigation, there are important incentives for countries to put a price on their domestic emissions, including public finance considerations, internalizing the climate impacts of their own emissions, and co-benefits, such as clean air or energy security. Whereas these arguments have been mostly discussed in separate strands of literature, this article carries out a synthesis that exemplifies how policies to put a price on emissions can be conceptualized in a multi-objective framework. Despite considerable uncertainty, empirical evidence suggests that different countries may face quite different incentives for emission pricing. For instance, avoided climate damages and co-benefits of reduced air pollution appear to be the main motivation for emission pricing in China, while for the US generating public revenue dominates and for the EU all three motivations are of intermediate importance. We finally argue that such unilateral incentives could form the basis for incremental progress in international climate negotiations toward a realistic climate treaty based on national interest and differentiated emission pricing and describe how such an agreement could be put into practice.
The integration of wind and solar generators into power systems causes “integration costs” – for grids, balancing services, more flexible operation of thermal plants, and reduced utilization of the capital stock embodied in infrastructure, among other things. This paper proposes a framework to analyze and quantify these costs. We propose a definition of integration costs based on the marginal economic value of electricity, or market value – as such a definition can be more easily used in economic cost-benefit assessment than previous approaches. We suggest decomposing integration costs intro three components, according to the principal characteristics of wind and solar power: temporal variability, uncertainty, and location-constraints. Quantitative estimates of these components are extracted from a review of 100 + published studies. At high penetration rates, say a wind market share of 30–40%, integration costs are found to be 25–35 €/MWh, i.e. up to 50% of generation costs. While these estimates are system-specific and subject to significant uncertainty, integration costs are certainly too large to be ignored in high-penetration assessments (but might be ignored at low penetration). The largest single factor is reduced utilization of capital embodied in thermal plants, a cost component that has not been accounted for in most previous integration studies.