This is where you are given the freedom to put it all together and craft a roadmap for a sustainable, prosperous future. We’ll pretend you have been granted the authority to completely control global carbon emissions and your job is to put together an emissions scenario for the next 200 years that accomplishes 4 things:
Follow the directions in Steps 1-6 and then cycle through these steps until you find your ideal scenario, then proceed to Step 7 and complete the project by making a poster. The poster will illustrate and explain your plan using a combination of graphs and text — it is the kind of thing that you’d expect a classmate to be able to understand in 10 minutes of study. There is an example of what this might look like in Step 7.
Submit your assignment in the Capstone Dropbox in Canvas. You can save as a PDF file (this can be done from Powerpoint), a regular PowerPoint file, or as a Google Slides file.
Description | Possible Points |
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Clarity of graphs and captions for graphs. The captions should explain what is plotted and what the units are. Recall that the goals of this course include developing the ability to interpret plots of data and to explain and understand the different units represented by the data — so you should keep this in mind while writing the captions. | 10 points |
Clarity of explanatory text. The graphs should be linked together with some explanatory text that explains how things are calculated, what assumptions you’ve used, and why they are reasonable assumptions. There should also be at least one short paragraph that sums it all up, explaining why this is the best roadmap. This explanatory text is the way that you will demonstrate a range of abilities that align with the goals and objectives of this course, including: the ability to explain scientific concepts in language that a non-scientist can understand; your systems-thinking knowledge, talking about feedbacks and interconnections between different parts of the system — how climate, energy, and economics are intertwined. We expect you to also convey your knowledge of the policy options that would be needed to make your roadmap a reality. |
20 points |
Overall layout. There should be a clear flow of logic in the way the poster is laid out. Following the steps laid out in the process will help with this. | 10 points |
Bonus There is a bonus for the roadmap that comes in with the lowest per capita total costs, using assumptions that are clearly justified. | 10 points |
Open the model [1]. Create a carbon emissions history that keeps the temperature below 2.0°C. If you just run the model as is, you'll see that global T change rises to about 4.5°C, so you need to reduce the carbon emissions by clicking on the graphical icon to the right and changing the curve. You'll probably have to try several versions of this until you get the temperature change to stay below 2°C. The video below, Capstone Project Step 1 Instructions, will show you how to do this. Please watch the video before doing anything with the model or answering the questions below.
NOTE: Skip these deliverables until you've cycled through Steps 1-6 and found your ideal scenario. Then produce the following:
A copy (screen shot) of the graph showing the carbon emissions and the global temperature change (page 1 of the graph pad). This will get pasted into your summary poster.
A brief statement demonstrating that this emissions history leaves us with enough fossil fuels left to last another 100 years. This too will be included in your summary poster, positioned next to the graph described above.
Take the ending amount of carbon in the Fossil Fuel reservoir (page 11) and divide it by the ending emissions rate (this will be in Gt C per year) — the result will be in years and is the time past 2200 when we would run out of fossil fuels.
Next, choose the mix of fossil fuels you will use by adjusting the fossil fuel fractions in the pie diagram to the right (move the small white circles around to change the percentages). Recall that each of these three forms of fossil fuel emit different amounts of carbon per unit of energy produced. Coal emits the most carbon per unit of energy, while gas emits the least, which means that if you have allowed yourself a certain amount of carbon emissions, you'd get more energy if you burned natural gas rather than coal. These percentages then determine something called the FF energy intensity (EJ/GT C, shown in the box next to the pie diagram), which is used to calculate the energy we would get from your carbon emissions history. FF energy intensity could be as high as 59 for 100% natural gas or as low as 35 for 100% coal — whatever percentages you use, you should be prepared to explain why you chose them.
These different fossil fuels also have different costs, and so choosing the percentages determines what is called the fossil fuel unit cost (in $Billions/EJ of energy).
Once you make your choice, you have to run the model once to see the calculated FF energy intensity value and the fossil fuel unit cost.
The video below, Capstone Project Step 2 Instructions, will show you how to do this using the controls of the model.
NOTE: Skip this deliverable until you've cycled through Steps 1-6 and found your ideal scenario. Then produce the following:
A brief statement saying what value you used for FF energy intensity, and how you chose that value — what does it represent in terms of a mix of coal, gas, and oil? Take a screen shot of the pie diagram and the associated numerical displays of fossil fuel unit cost and FF energy intensity. This statement and picture will be included in your summary report, along with a screen shot of page 2 of your graphs, which shows the total energy demand and how much of that energy comes from fossil fuels and how much comes from renewables. Note that the amount of renewable energy is just the total energy demand minus the energy obtained from fossil fuels.
Next, get the model to calculate how much energy we would need in total. This is easy — all you have to do is choose the global population limit and the history of per capita energy demand and the model combines these. You may choose whatever population limit you like. You may also change the per capita energy demand from the default, but it will cost you money, and you’ll have to keep track of that money (the model will keep track of it for you). The model does this by first calculating the total energy demand without any conservation (called the reference global energy demand in the model), using the default graph of per capita energy demand and the population — then we subtract from that the reduced energy demand (you need to lower the per capita energy demand curve) to give the amount of energy conserved (see page 12 of the graph pad). Next, the model takes this energy conserved and multiplies it by the unit cost of conserved energy, which is 0.5e9$/EJ (McKinsey, 2010) to get the conservation costs. Compare this unit cost of conservation to the unit costs of making energy from different sources by clicking on the Energy Costs button in the upper right of the model window, and you’ll see that conservation is a great deal. There is an upper limit here of 40% reduction from the reference curve, according to estimates from McKinsey (2010), so you can't push this too far. In fact, if you try to conserve an unrealistic amount, the model will override you and keep the actual per capita energy to within the 40% limit. Once you’ve got the total energy demand, the model subtracts the energy production from fossil fuels to get the energy that has to be supplied by renewables (non-fossil fuel sources).
The video below, Capstone Project Step 3 Instructions, will take you through the steps involved in this part of the project.
NOTE: Skip these deliverables until you've cycled through Steps 1-6 and found your ideal scenario. Then produce the following:
A graph showing the reference global energy demand and actual global energy demand and the energy conserved (page 12 of graph pad), along with the conservation costs.
A graph showing the global energy demand, the carbon-based energy, and the renewable energy (page 2 of graph pad). Both of these graphs should appear in your summary poster.
A brief statement of what you chose for a population limit, and what kinds of challenges (if any) you think might be involved in achieving this population limit. This should be positioned next to the graph above.
Make adjustments to the pie diagram that shows the percentages of different renewable energy sources — think of this as your renewable energy portfolio. The model default shows the current percentages, but you should feel free to change this, with a few restrictions, which you can see by clicking on the button to the upper right of this pie diagram.
The percentages you choose also determine the initial unit cost of renewable energy — each form of energy has a different unit cost, and the percentages you choose are combined in the model to give you the overall average, which is shown in the blue box to the upper left of the pie diagram. The estimated costs of each type of energy can be seen by clicking on the Energy Costs button, which shows:
Wind | 3.6 (drops by 15%/yr) |
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Geothermal | 11.9 |
Hydro | 5.5 |
Solar PV | 6 (drops by 20%/year) |
Nuclear | 31 |
Oil | 24 |
Coal | 17 |
Natural Gas | 10 |
The model assumes that the costs of geothermal, nuclear, and hydro are all constant over time, but the costs of wind and solar decrease over time, following an exponential function that is based on the recent history. These costs are the levelized (life-cycle) costs that we covered in Unit 2.
The key thing for us is the difference in cost between the various renewables and the fossil fuels. For example, if we wanted to switch 500 EJ of energy generation from fossil fuels to nuclear, this would cost us 31-18=12 \$billion per EJ, which is \$6 trillion more. Of course, money spent doing this would reduce the money spent on climate damages, so it might be a good thing -- and you can see if it is good thing by running the model several times with varying use of renewables.
If you study the energy costs, you might notice that many of the renewables are actually cheaper than fossil fuels in terms of energy generation — so why haven’t we already switched? The answer is largely related to the challenges in switching our energy infrastructure around — it will take some bold government leadership and our collective support to take the leap here. In addition, there are significant start-up costs — although with government backing, these costs can be spread out over a long time. We’ll assume that there is a cost to the switch that amounts to \$0.02/kWh, which is \$5.5e9/EJ in 2020. This cost related to switching energy sources is automatically added on to the cost of generating the renewable energy.
See the video, Capstone Step Four Instructions for some guidance on how to do this.
NOTE: Skip these deliverables until you've cycled through Steps 1-6 and found your ideal scenario. Then produce the following:
A brief statement of what you came up with for a unit cost of renewable energy, including what percentages of the different sources you used to come up with this number. Take a screen shot of the pie diagram of renewable percentages to accompany your statement.
Graphs showing your total energy costs, the renewable energy costs, and the carbon energy costs (page 3 of graph pad), and the unit energy costs (page 15 of graph pad). These graphs and the statement above will be included in your summary poster.
The next thing to do is to add up all of the costs related to your plan. The model will calculate the costs due to climate damages using the scheme from the modified DICE model (module 10 summative assessment) to do this. To get the total costs, we assume an economic growth rate (percent growth of gross economic output per year — the global GDP). It begins at $56 trillion per year grows at a constant annual growth rate of 1.5% for this time period.
The model then adds these climate damage costs to the total energy costs (renewables, plus switching costs, plus carbon-based energy) and the conservation costs to get the overall total costs.
For guidance on how to do this step, see the video below — Capstone Step 5 Instructions.
NOTE: Skip this deliverable until you've cycled through Steps 1-6 and found your ideal scenario. Then produce the following:
A graph showing the various costs (page 5 of the graph pad) -- the units here are all in trillions of dollars. This graph, along with some commentary will appear in your summary poster. The comments could draw the reader's attention to important things in the graph.
So far, you have gone through the process of designing a pathway or roadmap for the future and calculating the economic consequences of the set of assumptions/decisions that went into the roadmap. Now, the idea is to fiddle around with it to see if you can lower the costs, and remember that the best thing to compare here is the sum of the total costs per capita (in thousands of dollars per person), which is plotted on page 13 of the graph pad. Your best model from an economic standpoint is the one that generates the lowest value for this parameter.
In other words, you return to the earlier steps in this process, make a change, and then compare the costs with your previous version. As you do this, you will learn what kinds of changes lead to lower costs and you will eventually find the best roadmap (and remember that you also have to be able to justify it). One thing that you should do is to see if you can get a better economic result by keeping the global temperature well below the 2°C limit — in other words, go back to Step 1 and alter the carbon emissions curve to give you a lower temperature and then keep all of the other parts of the model the same, then run it again and see if you can get the sum of total costs per capita lower.
For guidance on how to do this step, see the video below — Capstone Step 6 Instructions.
After this step, you should have calculated your best roadmap. Include a copy of the graph on page 13 of the graph pad. This should show the plots from several different versions and should highlight the preferred version. There should be a brief statement summarizing what parts of the model you changed to make the different versions.
Once you’ve settled on your optimum roadmap, put it all together, into a kind of poster display — a large graphic with explanatory text that lays out your roadmap for the future (you can also submit it as a slide show in Powerpoint). To make this document, you’ll take screen shots of some of the model results, and add arrows and text that illustrate what choices you’ve made and explain your justification for choosing different values and scenarios. An easy way to do this is to use PowerPoint, where you can load, resize, position the screenshots and then add arrows, text, etc. as needed. You can specify the page size and make it very large, fitting everything onto just one slide (it should all be readable when you zoom in) — or you can put the materials onto a series of regular slides. You could do this in other programs too, such as Keynote or Adobe Illustrator, but whichever program you choose, make sure it can save as a PDF file that you will then submit in the Capstone Dropbox on Canvas.