I am going to look into the diffusion of biogas technology in the European Commission's TIPPING+ project. This is actually a project supposed to be part of the previous EC GreenWin project but did not materialise. This technology diffusion model is not a game-theoretic model that looks at the spread of technology through negotiation but a model that analyses the spread of a pathogen by mimicking how a pandemic spreads.
The person talking about doing that biogas model with us is a professor at the Sorbonne, Paris. I read the paper written by their team again before the meeting. They are using the same model to model how wind power has spread around the world. Wind power is the fastest-growing renewable energy source globally, and it provides the most usable energy for carbon reduction. For example, it is said that if wind power were developed in Patagonia, where the wind blows all year round, and converted to hydrogen energy and brought to Japan, it could meet all of Japan's electricity needs of 100 billion kWh. Of course, we know this is unrealistic, but that is how much potential there is in wind energy.
Back to the topic at hand, this analysis looks at the diffusion of 223 wind power technologies installed in 94 countries, broken down by producer and turbine size. It includes trade agreements and domestic policies, but the model was specifically designed to determine whether the country that provided the technology and the country that received the technology have each signed the Kyoto Protocol.
Although not really related to the Kyoto Protocol, several exciting things came out of the analysis. The hubs involved in the penetration of the technology are not present in developing countries. There is a lot of technology penetration from northern European countries like Germany and Sweden. Distance seems to be a factor in penetration. Still, countries like Canada and the United States where the power is there, and even very distant countries are contributing to penetration. Even countries that produce large amounts of wind power, such as China, do not contribute much to the international diffusion of the technology, probably because they focus on domestic consumption. This is also because this paper is not looking at production volumes. They are counting the penetration of a single technology so that even if many of the same technologies are deployed.
After all, this analysis makes me think that South-South cooperation, which encourages the spread of technology from developing countries to developing countries, is an illusion at the moment.
Comments