Characteristics and quality of energy scenarios

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1, University of Graz, course: Angewandte Betriebswirtschaftslehre, language: English, abstract: [...] Renewable energy sources on the other hand have been the major primary energy source before the era of the black gold. Today they amount for about 15% of the total primary energy demand, with biomass and hydro-power having with 10% and 5% the biggest shares. All the other renewable energy sources, as wind power, solar heat and photovoltaic, play a minor role since they don't even cover 1% of the primary energy demand. Renewable energy sources could solve both major problems of the energy sector, since they are carbon neutral and by definition renewable. The drawbacks are that at the moment most renewable sources are not competitive and need to be subsidized by governments and the technical challenge of storing the produced energy. It is easy to understand that the future of the energy sector is highly uncertain and that tools that are extrapolating past trends are of no use under these circumstances. In the last years several energy scenarios have been conducted, trying to display the major uncertainties. Not surprisingly the results are strongly varying, leading to question of the characteristics and the quality of scenarios. However there has been no analysis of the characteristics and quality of energy scenarios, which is being done in this bachelor thesis. After a short introduction of the history of scenarios in chapter 2.1, a general framework of the scenario development process is developed in chapter 2.2 and its possible variations are listed in chapter 2.3. The result is a scenario typology consisting of 15 variables that can be used to examine the characteristics and the quality of scenarios. The scenario typology is then applied at a total of 5 scenarios at chapter 2.4. The sample of scenarios was chosen to display the broad range of d