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Position Paper: CenSES Energy demand projections towards 2050
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4.4. Transportation sector
4.4.1. Energy service demand
The projection of transportation demand towards
2050 is based on input to the National transportation
plan, done by Institute for Transport Economics [11,
12]. The development of each sub-sector relative to
the transportation demand in 2010 is presented in
Figure 16. The demand for freight transport on road is
increasing the most and it is motivated by the expected
economic growth and increased international trade.
The passenger road traffic will increase by approx. 1 %
annually. The growth of the reference path is higher
than the population growth and an alternative scenario
with an increased transportation demand based on the
population growth is analysed in the REF-EE and LOW
scenarios.
The technology development has a great impact on the
projection of energy use of transportation. Important
modelling parameters include future investment costs,
efficiencies, production costs and availabilities of new
fuels as hydrogen and biofuels. The development of
investment costs and efficiencies of passenger cars used
in the analyses are presented in Figure 17 and Figure
18. Use of battery electric cars is limited to 50% of the
passenger car demand in the reference path. Second
generation biofuels produced in Norway is available
from 2025 in the analyses. The present policy with
exemption of nonrecurring tax and VAT of hydrogen
and electric cars is assumed to continue until 2020
and then these cars have the same taxes as other cars.
The calculation principles of the nonrecurring tax are
assumed to be as they are today and therefore zero
emission vehicles, such as biofuel, battery and hydrogen
will continue having the low nonrecurring tax.
Investment cost for new vehicles is based on a study
carried out at Joint Research Centre (JRC) in the
Netherlands, with an exception for hydrogen vehicles
(FCEV) as the costs of FCEV seems very optimistic with
an investment cost [4, 13]. The costs for new types of
vehicles are assumed to decrease as function of time.
As the Norwegian market is limited, it is not considered
any decrease in investment cost as function of sales
volumes.
The energy use in transport was 58 TWh in 2010. Energy
use by trailer and delivery truck represented 27 % of
the total energy use in transport in 2010. According to
the projection freight transport will increase from 12.5
mill vehicle-km in 2010 to 25.7 mill vehicle-km in 2050,
and are having the highest increase of the transport
modes. Transport modes using road (car, freight and
bus) represented 60 % of the energy use in transport in
2010, while domestic sea transport represented 22 % of
the energy use.
4.4.2. Energy consumption
The energy use for transportation will decrease in the
reference path due to more efficient vehicles. If future
passenger cars would be the present mix of vehicles, the
energy use by cars in 2050 would be 25 TWh as in the
Frozen scenario of Figure 20. The energy efficiency gain
of the reference path is about 11 TWh for passenger
cars in 2050 or 7 TWh less than in 2010. One very
important assumption is the continued low investment
cost of biofuel cars, based on the present calculation
method, and cost and availability of Norwegian second
generation biofuels. Further analyses have to be done to
illustrate the importance and robustness of the different
parameters.