NATIONAL ENERGY TRANSITION STRATEGIES TO HARNESS LOCAL RENEWABLE ENERGIES BASED ON CRITERION WEIGHTS

摘要

Recent scientific and novel research on climate change have reported that world leaders have at most twelve years to implement radical policies to safeguard planet earth from the snares of global warming[1][2]. Evidence and facts from reliable historical data shows that the use of fossil fuels as sources of energy are key drivers of the ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Not only are fossil fuels (FFs) environmentally unfriendly, they are also non-renewable and unsustainable. Policymakers are battling with the problem of fulfilling the energy needs of consumers without polluting the environment and a swift switch to use of renewables is practically a feasible option. The dominance of FFs as depicted in trends in historical energy demand for the United States of America (USA) and Canada has left greater quantities of local renewable and sustainable energies in these countries untapped. Based on the strong causal relationships between energy supply and economic growth and development, the use of FFs as key sources of supply suggests that these energies are deeply rooted in the economies of both countries and realistic transition pathways are needed to guage USA and Canada in their quest to a green and sustainable world without disrupting the smooth flow of the economic system. Though a number of climate-saving transition pathways have been proposed, there is little evidence of models that dwell on local renewable energies as key drivers of change. Here, we use criterion weights to propose a basket of national energy transition pathways that focus primarily on the use local renewables for USA and Canada. Contrary to well-adopted subjective criterion weight models, our weighting model is devoid of the subjective judgements of modellers. Further, the model can be implemented for medium-term, long-term and very long-term renewable energy transition pathway modelling; and we also estimate the dollar values of costs, benefits and net present value of each transition path per country.