Sufficiency enables European final energy demand to be halved by 2050

In an article recently published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from the Wuppertal Institute and 13 other institutions investigate the enormous potential of sufficiency policies for the European energy supply: The authors show that it is possible to halve Europe's final energy demand by 2050 compared to 2019 – the majority of this through sufficiency measures across all sectors. The researchers thus propose an ambitious but realistic decarbonisation pathway for Europe that is not only compatible with the 1.5 degree target, but also enables a 77 per cent share of renewable energy by 2040 and 100 per cent by 2050, avoids the need for energy imports to Europe and makes the deployment of carbon capture and storage technologies largely expendable.

The basis for the researchers' calculations is the CLEVER scenario (a Collaborative Low Energy Vision for the European Region), which prioritises sufficiency measures and supplements them with efficiency increases and the expansion of renewable energies. This approach differs from most traditional energy scenarios, which typically focus on the decarbonisation of the energy supply, then add measures to increase efficiency and only consider sufficiency as a last resort – if at all. "The sufficiency-based CLEVER approach not only has advantages in terms of the pace of emission reductions, but also reduces the investment and land requirements for the expansion of renewable energies while ensuring a fairer distribution of efforts between European countries," explains Johannes Thema, Senior Researcher in the Energy Policy Research Unit at the Wuppertal Institute and co-author of the paper. He adds: "Our modelling clearly shows that sufficiency measures enable Europe to massively reduce its energy demand – and thus cut the costs of the energy transition and quickly return to the 1.5-degree pathway. Missing out on sufficiency will either endanger decarbonisation or lead to high external effects for energy and resource imports".

The article "The key role of sufficiency for low demand based carbon neutrality and energy security across Europe" is available free of charge via the link below.