Counterfactuals as a new tool for understanding the feasibility of rapid energy transitions

The feasibility of rapid low-carbon energy transitions is strongly debated with examples of ambitious energy and climate policies driving change yet facing vested interests and resistance from incumbents. In this paper we develop a method for empirically-grounded counterfactual scenarios based on the speed and depth of the energy transitions. We start from the premise that national cases of energy transitions can serve as reference cases and thus be a proxy or the speed of low-carbon energy growth and fossil fuel decline. We then use a suite of national energy transitions, including contemporary transitions associated with fossil fuel decline and renewable energy growth as well as historical ones associated with nuclear energy expansion to investigate the interplay of technological factors and institutional factors. We examine how lumpy (nuclear power) and granular (wind and solar power) technologies expand under a variety of political regimes and various levels of technological and economic development. We find that historically the fastest growth was achieved by lumpy technologies in advanced industrialised democracies that were also technology front-runners with centrally managed electricity systems and strongly motivated by energy crises. We use these observations to construct a series of global counterfactual scenarios to explore the climate implications of technology deployment under different institutional and socio-technical conditions for rapid technology deployment and coal phase-out.