The future of sustainable development is the bioeconomy with both global and local renewable energy solutions. The updated Bioeconomy Strategy and the Green Deal serves as prove of European Commission commitment for transformation towards a sustainable and climate-neutral European Union. This process is characterized with an enormous complexity and should be studied thoroughly for designing transition pathways. Scientifically sound methods can support policymaking in dealing with uncertainty and complexity taking place within definition of transition pathways. This article reviews the existing bioeconomy development models, and presents a novel model, which focus on agriculture – one of the main directions of the national economy. The concept of model is tested within a case study of crop production sector in Latvia. The results of case study show economically viable scenario for added value target set for 2030. In the crop sector, the baseline scenario and three alternative scenarios were analysed. The highest added value and the most advantageous alternative scenario is for fibre powder produced from cereal bran (in the bioeconomy sector, food provides the highest added value).
Sectoral integration will play a major role in the clean energy transition to increase the utilisation rates of available renewable energy sources (RES). Preliminary studies have shown that the decarbonisation of power generation can be reached through well-developed technical solutions such as the integration of hydro, wind, and solar energy. However, emissions in the buildings, transport, and industrial sectors remain stubbornly high. Therefore, the electrification of these sectors and interconnection through smart grids have been identified as promising future development trends to avoid the usage of fossil fuels. The TIMES optimisation model is used to evaluate the future cost-effective pathways for reaching carbon neutrality in the Latvian energy sector. The model includes both the end-use sectors such as transport, buildings, industry and agriculture and the energy sector with a well-developed database of existing and future RES and storage technologies. The modelling framework allows for identifying the cost-optimal future energy mix by considering the electrification potential of each sector. Therefore, it allows analysing of the impact of different policy strategies at sectoral integration levels and the necessity for additional energy storage capacities. The preliminary results show that one of regret-free solutions for reaching the energy efficiency targets in 2030 is the wide expanse of heat pump utilisation in residential buildings instead of inefficient biomass boilers. The building heat supply transformation also brings higher power consumption and interacts with the wider utilisation of wind power. In addition, sensitivity analyses have been performed to evaluate the impact of high uncertainties related to fuel costs, resource availability and other conditions.
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