Households under carbon constraint. Modeling residential and transports sectors with TIMES in a prospective context

The energy and political context in France suggests that households would have to deal with a strong constraint of CO₂ emissions reduction in the next decades. Many questions then arise: Which technologies would enable this level of emission reduction? What policies should be implemented to achieve such a reduction? What is the impact of these policies on household budget? This PhD work tries to answer to these issues thanks to a residential and transports sectors TIMES model, which is a bottom-up model based on an optimization paradigm. This model relies on a highly disaggregated representation of households that allows a largely enhanced level of confidence in the results obtained, compared to other bottom-up models. Moreover, thanks to a survey we have launched among 2000 French households we are able to better design household energy consumption behavior. It is thus possible to take into account the constraints faced by the households and the tradeoffs they make between cost and comfort. This model is very useful for evaluating different policy tools considering their ability to lead to strong reductions and their impact on the household budget. A carbon tax then seems a good way to reduce CO₂ emissions and subsidies seem to enhance the impact of the tax and help to reduce its distorting effect on household budget. (author)