An overview on assessed scenarios of the assessment of short-term (2020) prospects for RES cooperation with neighbouring countries is given in Figure 3-1. For this policy-related techno-economic assessment the Green-X model has been applied. From a topical viewpoint a focus is put on the need for an impact of RES cooperation for achieving binding national 2020 RES targets, and to assess if and how neighbouring countries, concretely the assessed Western Balkan countries - all being Contracting Parties of the Energy Community, could contribute to that.
Figure 3-1: Overview on assessed scenarios in the assessment of RES cooperation with third countries in the 2020 context (Green-X modelling)
A set of four distinct scenarios has been derived to identify the need for and impacts of RES cooperation - between EU Member States as well as in the enlarged geographical context - incl. Western Balkan countries, all being Contracting Parties of the Energy Community. Common to all cases is that a continuation of national RES policies until 2020 is assumed. More precisely, the assumption is made that these policies will be further optimised in the future with regard to their effectiveness and efficiency in order to meet 2020 RES targets (as set by the RE Directive 2009/28/EC) both at EU and EC level as well as at national level. Thus, all cases can be classified as strengthened national (RES) policies, considering improved financial support as well as the mitigation of non-economic barriers that hinder an enhanced RES deployment.
To identify possible cost-saving potentials that come along with a stronger use of cooperation mechanisms, three different variants of national RES support and RES cooperation, respectively, have been assessed. These scenarios can be distinguished as follows:
- The reference case is defined by a scenario named EU only: In this scenario an efficient and effective RES target achievement is envisaged rather at EU level than fulfilling each national RES target purely domestically. A European perspective accomplished by strong RES cooperation between countries is consequently assumed – geographically this form of cooperation is however limited to EU Member States.
- In contrast to above, a national perspective is researched, done at EU level only, and where Member States primarily aim for a pure domestic RES target fulfilment and, consequently, only limited cooperation is expected to arise from that.
- Two cases of geographically extended strong RES cooperation are assessed, named as EU plus scenarios: these scenarios assume full RES cooperation across the EU as well as assessed Western Balkan countries, whereby in accordance with the bottom-up assessment two distinct demand trends (i.e. high and low demand) are used for Western Balkan countries to indicate uncertainty on this key input parameter in our analysis.
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