How may the availability of critical raw materials affect the deployment of material-intensive technologies and the security of energy systems?

Ensuring energy security is one of the main objectives of energy policies of many countries worldwide. In this regard, this thesis proposes a metric to evaluate the security of energy systems under medium-to-long term energy scenarios generated by the energy system optimization model TEMOA??Italy. Such a metric consists of an index covering several dimensions of energy security, encompassing the security of energy supply and the internal reliability of the system. Among these dimensions, the inclusion of the supply risk of critical raw materials represents a novelty compared to the existing literature. It enables to account for the possible risks due to the disruption of the minerals supply chains. The latter are the focus of the scenario analysis performed through the TEMOA-Italy open-source model, after the definition of the energy security index. The developed scenarios encompass several geopolitical perspectives, by considering different constraints on the minerals consumption. It results that the energy supply mix does not considerably change across the various scenarios. In the low??emissions scenarios, the main contribution from gas supply is replaced by renewable sources as bioenergy, solar, and wind. Similarly, also the power sector composition is almost unchanged, resulting in a similar future trend for the indicators that mainly depend on its composition, such as CF and CC. In the analysis on energy security a higher weight is assigned to the materials supply risk indicator, which variation results in having more influence on the energy security index time evolution than the other indicators. The minerals consumption in the different scenarios is also evaluated, analyzing how the latter can affect the materials supply risk. The highest consumption occurs for the net-zero emission scenario, with almost 21 Mt. In the water stress regions scenario, the materials consumption is much lower, reaching 9 Mt, and this is associated with the highest value of energy security. This result is mainly due to the transport sector technology mix, which does not include electric cars only as low carbon alternative. Lastly, this work provides a quantification of the cost of energy security. It results that the additional cost per percentage security unit earned is equal to 8.7 B€/%, while the additional cost to reduce the material supply risk is about 2.1 B€/%.