Long-term energy prospective modeling for South America. Application to international climate negotiations

Together, Central and South America and the Caribbean represent more than 450 million people and 12% of the Earth's total emerged land. The region stands out in the global energy landscape for the outstanding contribution of renewable sources to its energy production. Maintaining this level of renewable energy in the future might prove a challenging task, as historical energy sources run into sustainability issues and new options still depend on public support schemes. Climate change is also a region-scale concern: the continent's emissions per capita are above the global average, and the region is also likely to be one of the most impacted by climate change. Despite shared strengths and concerns, South America appears as a highly heterogeneous and fragmented continent. The region's physical layout is a stumbling block for regional integration. The historical evolution has created strong disparities between national energy sectors. Various attempts to cooperate on transnational infrastructure have ended up as costly failures in past years. The aim of this PhD work was to develop a mathematical model adapted to the study of long-term energy issues in South America. This model, TIMES-America Latina y el Caribe, was then applied to studying the impact of national climate policies on regional energy. This document is divided in five chapters. Chapter 1 offers a historical overview of South America's history with a focus on the energy sector, followed by a description of the specificities and challenges of South American energy today. Chapter 2 presents the concepts of prospective and scenario modeling, along with a historical overview and a state-of-the-art of energy prospective in South America. Chapter 3 details the model's main features: its ten-region disaggregation, its modeling rules and the structure and main assumptions for supply and demand, including macroeconomic drivers, resource potentials, and extraction costs. Chapter 4 presents the climate change issue and its implications for South America; it also describes the international climate negotiations, from their beginning in 1972 to the current tentative contributions. Finally, chapter 5 analyses the impacts of these pledges on South America's energy sector, and the contribution of the latter to fulfilling these pledges. (author)