Extending Scenarios for Technology Development Planning in Power Generation
The Scenario Planning methodology has been applied by national and international institutions to long term studies of possible future evolutions of primary and final energy consumption, power generation capacity, emerging power generation technologies and green house gas emissions. Power generation equipment manufacturing companies are large enough to have considerable influence on how the future of the energy world will unfold, through their investment decisions in technology development. On the other hand, their future depends on external factors, out of their control, such as economics, demographics, public opinion, government policies, availability of natural resources and competitor technologies, not all of them explicitly considered in the scenarios published by those institutions. If robust technology development strategies are to be chosen, it is essential for a manufacturer, in the first place, to have as clear as possible an understanding not only of the published long-term scenarios, but also of the certainties and uncertainties regarding the driving factors that can significantly affect its future in particular. From this understanding, it should ideally create its own set of scenarios, against which it should test its strategies. In a previous paper the author discussed external factors and aspects of published scenarios, which are relevant for manufacturers within their usual planning time scales. From that discussion, two scenarios were proposed, as alternative ‘futures’ to the scenarios published by the International Energy Agency. The study was restricted to the OECD countries. In this paper, an extension of the previous work is presented, where some non-OECD countries are included and new external factors are considered, relevant in the context of these countries, which are China, Brazil and India.