In the past days I completed the scenario runs for the dynamics of decarbonization research topic that I had mentioned in my post on April 30. As described there, I ran WITCH replicating the exercise framework outlined in the draft of the SWITCH paper, focusing on China (a country analyzed in the SWITCH runs as well) and on the global results, the latter for the sake of completeness.

Today I met with Juan Pablo Carvallo, the lead author of the SWITCH paper here at RAEL, to discuss the possible routes to integrate our results. We agreed that including the WITCH runs in the current SWITCH paper could be problematic, since the paper carries out a consistent comparison across different countries explored by SWITCH and it would be somehow unbalanced should we add results from a different model and for just one of those countries. Therefore we decided that the current SWITCH paper will be finalized autonomously by the RAEL team keeping its current structure, while we will develop a new paper specifically focused on the comparison between WITCH and SWITCH, obviously considering China as a common case study. We do think that this paper can have an interesting value added, since it would allow exploring the dynamics of decarbonization comparing how this is captured by a detailed model of the electric sector (SWITCH) and a more general Integrated Assessment Model (WITCH), whose description of the electric sector has a good level of detail, but obviously lower than the former.

I will include the preliminary results of the WITCH runs in my presentation on June 20 at FEEM, then I will outline a first scheme of the new paper in July, which I will share with Juan Pablo and Prof. Kammen. The objective is to write a first complete draft of the paper by the end of summer.