ModIWE

In order to achieve Germany’s climate protection targets, energy-intensive industrial sectors such as the steel, chemical and cement industries must be decarbonised. Effective measures for the sustainable transformation of German industry, however, require an understanding of industrial structures on the one hand, and of their interactions with the energy system and the wider economy on the other. This is where the ModIWE project comes in.

The overarching project objective is to develop an integrated set of data and modelling tools that provides a holistic view of energy-intensive industry as well as its interactions with the energy system and the wider economy. Methodologically, the project team draws on the Wuppertal Institute’s ITOM model family and develops it further to map policy instruments more precisely. On this basis, the researchers use ITOM to develop transformation pathways for the steel, chemical and cement sectors. In addition, the researchers refine and deploy macroeconomic models from the Wuppertal Institute and the project partner GWS to represent energy-intensive industries. These macroeconomic models link the transformation at sector level with the level of the economy as a whole – thereby enabling the modelling of interactions between industrial transformation and energy consumption, GDP, employment and foreign trade, as well as the effects on GHG emissions and resource consumption.

To link the bottom-up industry models with the macroeconomic models, the project team compiles more finely differentiated, expanded multi-regional input-output tables to better represent industrial sectors, and develops soft links to establish relationships between the respective data structures. The practical applicability of the modelling toolkit is demonstrated through an exemplary implementation of scenario analyses. The data, methodologies and model components developed during the project are made available via open access.