A more fine-grained bottom-up approach to climate change can identify important climate variations across countries as well as what technologies would help in meeting emission-reduction goals, reports a paper published in Nature Climate Change.
At the 2010 UN climate change conference in Cancun, nations agreed on a number of new mechanisms – such as the Green Climate Fund – to support financially the greenhouse-gas emissions abatement efforts of developing countries. However, the instruments for delivering aid and the extent of different countries’ financial needs and requirements are still in debate.
Tobias Schmidt and colleagues from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), contributed to the debate using a new methodology to assess in particular the costs of photovoltaic and wind power in six very different developing countries: Brazil, Nicaragua, Egypt, Kenya, India and Thailand. Their results showed that photovoltaic electricity costs are larger than wind costs in all countries (between 2.2 to 4.5 times in 2010) and are likely to remain so at least until 2020 (between 1.7 and 3.4 times). However, the incremental electricity cost of wind (the cost of wind energy minus the cost of baseline energy) varies significantly across countries:  it is very high in Brazil, India and Thailand, much lower in Egypt and negative in Kenya and Nicaragua.
Read the full results on Nature Climate Science.

Photo by warrenski.