Evaluation and forecast of CO2 emissions in the electricity sector for European targeted countries =

Over the last years, the increased sensitivity in environmental issues leads to the development of energy policies to reduce CO2 emissions. The most polluting sector is electricity generation. For this reason, Life Cycle Assessment has been chosen as tool to evaluate the variation in the production of kg of CO2 per kWh of electricity produced until 2030. In this work particularly, two target countries were chosen, Germany and Spain due to their willingness to participate in the energy transition objective. The scenarios of electricity production are based on the National Energy Plan of each country. Each of these plans indicates the energy policies for the implementation of renewable energy sources, and also coal and nuclear power plants decommissioning. Both countries are aiming at a strong implementation of renewables, especially wind and photovoltaic. Moreover, there is a strong development of solar thermal in Spain, and biomass has a relevant role in the German mix. However, while Germany is more focused on the denuclearisation process, Spain gives priority to decarbonization. Coal plays a minor role in the Spanish electricity mix, therefore this country can become carbon neutral in the power generation sector by 2025. Afterward, the nuclear decommissioning process would begin. The presence of coal in the electricity mix of German is much stronger, which is the reason why the phase-out process is expected to be longer. Meanwhile, the decommissioning of nuclear power plants should be fast ending in 2022. These variations in the electricity mix would cause a strong reduction in the value of CO2 emissions per kWh of electricity produced. Specifically, a reduction of 48 % is expected for Germany and 34 % for Spain to produce 1 kWh of electricity. Thus, in the electricity generation sector, a reduction of 54 % is expected for Germany and 65 % for Spain due to different energy demands. The second part of the study uses machine learning techniques for time series to analyze the trends of CO2 emissions in the last 50 years, to forecast the CO2 emissions for the following 10 years. This allows an evaluation of the energy policies' effectiveness implemented so far and then to modify them in case they are not going in the right direction. In the case of Spain, it is not possible to proceed with this analysis because the model failed the validation test. For Germany, however, it was possible to continue with the analysis. In this way, it is possible to observe that this country is moving in the right direction for reducing emissions in the electricity generation sector. Besides, comparing this trend with what would be obtained from the projected scenario, the results show that new policies would produce better results than the policies used so far. Despite the increasing emissions trend of the last years, Spain is deeply reducing the emissions relative to the electricity generation sector. Indeed, the results in terms of CO2 emitted for kWh of electricity produced are lower than the German case. Although the effectiveness of energy policies and the decreasing trend, Germany has already a high value of emissions due to the presence of coal in the electricity mix.