Scenarios for Future Trade Flows of Energy Technologies

Abstract

The upcoming global transformation process towards climate neutrality requires an enormous investment in renewable energy technologies and their production methods. From the analysis of historical trade patterns, it can be assumed that there will be country-specific differences in production capabilities. It is therefore likely that new trade patterns will emerge, which can be to a large part determined by today’s country specific production capabilities and specializations. In this paper we use the information included in future global energy scenarios and combine them with empricical knowledge on historical international trade patterns and their evoultion to estimate future global trade scenarios. The global market value which is internationally traded for the assessed scenario is 10,5 Trillion US-$2020, accumulated until 2070. While wind and photovoltaic technologies have the largest shares (63% and 31%, respectively), the market value share for electrolysers is much smaller (5.5%), but the development of future global market shares for this technology is rather uncertain. Therefore, in this paper we focus primarily on the future trade flows of electrolysers.