Adequate service provision as the guide for energy transitions and international development

Abstract

The reliance of human societies on fossil-fuelled energy supply used for human activities has increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to levels that cause unprecedented atmospheric warming. The emissions have been the result of a handful of countries that industrialised, changing their systems and improving the well-being of their population over time. Given the global harmful consequences of such emissions, industrialised economies have planned an energy transition to curb them. In contrast, many developing countries that need higher levels of well-being have agreed to emission-limiting international agreements, forcing them to seek alternative ways to increase well-being. GHG emissions are connected to resource consumption (i.e. energy and materials), which in turn provide the `services', either to cover needs or desires by people. The delivery of services requires multiple resource transformations, with inefficiencies at each transformation. Developing countries face the challenge to deliver services and increase well-being, while limiting emissions. This thesis refers to this idea as climate-compatible development. Researchers have explored the links between energy use, development and well-being, but have mostly overlooked the multiple transformations and losses that occur between resource extraction and service provision. Such in-depth exploration is hindered by a lack of granular data describing these resource transformations. As a result, technical and policy efforts to reduce emissions focus mainly on low-carbon energy supply options, despite the high emission reduction potential from end-uses, which are closer to services. This thesis postulates that service provision is more closely linked to development outcomes, than primary energy supply. Therefore, assessing historical service provision, will elucidate ways to deliver decent well-being levels with reduced emissions. The research is organised into three main areas. The first attempts to measure to what extent increases in service delivery have led to higher levels of development, using indicators at several transformation stages for the first time. The research tracks variations in 34 resource transformation and development indicators over time, across 100 countries. Regressions between these indicators suggest that for constant service-related levels, development is decoupling from the service indicators with significant regression results. The links between the pairs of indicators depend on the service studied, the model used, the indicators in question, the countries included and specific temporal dynamics. The pace of change of service provision is affected by dynamics that require systematic understanding. The second research area explores the use of scarce developing country data to investigate service provision. A bottom-up analysis and stakeholder interviews are undertaken to investigate which insights around service provision may be drawn from analysing national household surveys in Uganda. Changes in energy sources and energy use patterns are examined from 2009 to 2016 focusing on lighting and cooking, aggregated by urban and rural settlements, and household expenditure deciles. Transformations of final to useful energy are evaluated for cooking, including an uncertainty analysis. The results reveal a slow transition away from traditional biomass and kerosene use, especially for lighting in low-expenditure rural settlements and cooking in general. Fuel stacking, mainly for cooking, is contributing to the slow transition and to higher emissions, especially in wealthier households. Changes in service provision are occurring in the country, related to lighting, transport, and mobile phones, yet the changes face local challenges such as language diversity. The third research area explores which stages of resource transformation (i.e. primary, final, useful energy and services) are represented in policy and regulations. A country-level database of 10,811 policies for the period 1960-2020 is analysed. Several machine learning models to predict the policy characteristics (i.e. instrument type, topic) and scope (i.e. sector, end-use, technology) are created. The highest prediction accuracy resulted to be 80%, depending on the number of labels to predict. The evaluation of policy mixes using the predicted values suggests that most economic sectors have a mix of well-balanced policies after 2005. The analysis revealed there has been a shift in the past two decades away from similar proportions of Buildings, Transport and Generation policies between 2000 and 2009 to a focus on Buildings, and some Transport in the next decade. The results also suggest that regulating activities closer to services is increasing the number of policies required. Low-income countries focus mainly on energy generation policies, yet Sub-Saharan Africa is beginning to regulate later stages of the chain, e.g. final, through Buildings policies. The fundamental contributions of this thesis to the literature are the confirmation of links and interacting factors between service delivery and development outcomes, including the identification of suitable indicators for evaluating service provision. Further, the use of country-level surveys is shown to identify levels and uncertainty of household service delivery in developing countries, with useful stakeholder insights. Finally, the resource transformation stages included in policies are shown to have changed over time towards higher service coverage, but less so for low-income countries.