Project

As part of its internal reflection on the development of a 2050 Energy Efficiency Vision, the Coalition for Energy Savings has commissioned Fraunhofer ISI to assess the potential for energy savings by 2050 under three different scenarios (see below). The tasks included an update of the techno-economic energy savings potentials and to develop and assess scenarios focusing on changes in life-style, the impact of digitalisation, of a shared economy and many more (so called “New Societal Trends“). These changes can have an impact on energy efficiency improvements and contribute to decrease or increase energy consumption beyond the linear trends. In particular, an increase in energy consumption might be the result of new societal trends that are not accompanied by policies with a strong implementation of the Energy Efficiency First (EE1) Principle.

Fraunhofer ISI carried out three scenario workshops with Members of the Coalition for Energy Savings (about 20-30 experts on average) in the period between January and September 2018 to explore the 2050 energy perspective in order to inform the selection of trends and literature and the Fraunhofer ISI expert decisions regarding modelling assumptions. The three workshops focused on: the development of micro-worlds in 2050 (Workshop 1), the selection of (energy-relevant) megatrends and trend profiles (Workshop 2), and the development of three scenarios and one variant up to 2050 (Workshop 3). The work focussed on identifying the most energy-relevant trends and combined the trends into four main societal trend clusters, consisting of detailed trends with relevance for energy consumption and which formed the basis for the scenario work in this report.