Storylines for Low Carbon Futures of the European Energy System exchange format and template

The mitigation of the increasingly visible events and consequences of global warming and climate change are one of the biggest challenges of humankind. Ultimately, a global effort is necessary to implement corresponding corrective actions and strategies. A key aspect in this context is to limit GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions in the future. One of the most prominent representatives in terms of emissions is CO2. Moreover, limiting the remaining global CO2 budget in the energy and transport systems is one of the key necessities to comply with a maximum global temperature increase. The European Commission is fully committed to several climate-related challenges and takes responsibility for immediate decisive policy actions necessary. Recently, in November 2018, the long term strategic vision to reduce GHG emissions was presented, indicating how Europe can lead the way to climate neutrality (an economy with net-zero GHG emissions) in 2050 and beyond. Strategies and options have been explored on how this can be achieved by looking at all the key economic sectors. Anticipating climate neutrality in 2050 in a global context (i.e. 100% GHG emission reduction compared to 1990 level) would limit global temperature increase to 1.5 °C, and avoid some of the worst climate impacts and reduce the likelihood of extreme weather events and others. Logically, Europe cannot decide on policies and strategies on global level. However, Europe at least can act on the leading edge of implementing climate mitigation policies in Europe and thus act as a global role model. In the context, one of the main challenges is to anticipate the future development of the energy system. This, however, is not easy. From today’s point-of-view, it is virtually impossible to anticipate how a future energy system will look like in detail. Too many uncertainties in terms of possible future developments exist. Therefore, it is important to consider at least future narratives in terms of possible developments, cornerstones and features of a future energy system. This is exactly what this document, Deliverable D7.1, is about. The overall motivation of this document is to develop narratives of a few realistic and possible future energy worlds. It is important to note here, that the storyteller does not have any preference about one (or a most probable) future development. On the contrary, several of the possible narratives presented in this document can happen in the future likewise