Cost Assessment of Sustainable Energy Systems – CASES
CASES is a Co-ordination Action made up of 26 EU and non-EU partners that, under the co-ordination of FEEM, aims to compile coherent and detailed estimates of both external and internal costs of energy production for different energy sources for EU-25 under 2030 energy scenarios; to evaluate policy options for improving the efficiency of energy use, taking account of the full cost data; and to disseminate research findings to energy sector producers and users and to the policy making community.
CASES aims at evaluating policy options for improving the efficiency of energy use, underpinning this evaluation with a consistent and comprehensive picture of the full cost of energy, and to make this crucial knowledge available to all stakeholders.
In particular CASES aims at compiling a complete and coherent assessment of the full cost (external plus private cost) of different energy sources, in EU and selected non-EU countries, under well-defined energy scenarios to 2030. The cost database provides a crucial quantitative support to the assessment of alternative policy options in the perspective of improving the efficiency of energy use.
CASES, in providing a set of recommendations on the use of different policy instruments for the internalisation of the external costs of energy production, contributes directly to policy and provides an information base on the effectiveness and on the consequences of the use of different instruments.
In addition, the assessment of the full cost estimates of energy production enhances the awareness of policy-makers on the consequences that different fuels and technologies have on human health, the environment and society.
Finally the project disseminates research findings to energy sector producers and users, and to the policy-making community.
FEEM is responsible for the overall scientific, administrative and financial co-ordination of the project. In addition FEEM is the leader of the project’s work package dealing with the national level estimation of energy costs in EU countries. The work package aims at designing and compiling a data template for each country and for each energy to account for private and external estimates, and ultimately to derive the full cost of each energy source in each country.
Moreover, the work package carries out a comparative full cost assessment in order to identify inconsistencies and structural variations among countries, in the total costs composition. In addition FEEM contributes to four other working packages dealing with the provision of electricity scenarios up to 2030 for EU-25 countries, Bulgaria, Turkey, Brazil, India and China, (which ensures a dynamic framework to all the analyses developed by the project), the policy assessment of instruments to internalise environment-related external costs in EU member states, for renewable and non renewable energy sources, and finally with the evaluation of the role of uncertainty of external cost estimates for policy making.