DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2018.953
title: Long-term electricity planning: a case study of Cambodia and Thailand

description: The drastically increasing share of fossil fuel supply to meet the high growth of energy demand in Cambodia and Thailand results in increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from power generation in both countries. In 2015, fossil fuels used in electricity generation in Cambodia and Thailand accounted for around 51.75% and 85% of the total electricity generation, respectively. Thus, increasing the electricity supply from conventional power plants to meet the high demand poses a serious concern for energy security and environmental impact in the region.Cambodia and Thailand need to increase their electricity generation to meet the future electricity demand which is used to support economic development. Due to the increase in fossil fuel prices and environmental concerns, the governments of both countries should modify their plans in order to upgrade the reliability of the energy supply by choosing proper alternative energy sources with affordable prices in the long term.Both countries have great potential for renewable energy sources but some of those sources have not been utilized yet. The high capital cost of technologies is the main obstacle of promoting renewable energy sources for power generation. However, in order to utilize renewable energy and diminish dependency on imported fossil fuels as well as to mitigate CO2 emissions from the power sector, the utilization of solar and biomass energy has been considered in this study. In this study, the Long-range Energy Planning (LEAP) model is used to analyze the electricity generation mix and CO2 mitigation from five main different scenarios, namely the Business-as-Usual (BAU), Renewable Energy (RE), Carbon Capture Storage (CCS), Carbon Tax (CT), and Electric Vehicle (EV) scenarios during 2015 to 2050. In this study, the BAU scenario is constructed following the power development targets in PDP2020. Three renewable energy scenarios are analyzed, i.e. RE1, RE2 and RE3. In the RE1 scenario, 5% of total electricity generation will be generated from solar by 2050 and in the RE2 scenario, 5% of total electricity generation will be generated from biomass by 2050. In the RE3, 10% of total electricity generation will be generated from solar and biomass by 2050. Moreover, in the CCS scenario, CO2 mitigation measures that replace 50% of conventional coal-fired power plants with carbon capture storage (CCS) technology in coal power plants have been analyzed. Furthermore, there are two carbon tax profiles, namely CT100 and CT500 scenarios. In the CT100 scenario, the carbon tax is fixed at $100/tCO2 from 2020 while in the CT500 scenario step increasing carbon taxes of $20/tCO2 from 2020 to $500/tCO2 by 2050 are applied to both countries. In addition, in the EV scenario, 5% and 10% of electric vehicles will replace conventional vehicles from 2020 to 2035 and 2035 to 2050, respectively, for Cambodia, and 10%, 20% and 30% of electric vehicles will replace conventional vehicles from 2020 to 2030, 2030 to 2040 and 2040 to 2050, respectively, for Thailand.Results show that the CT500 scenario has high potential to reduce CO2 emissions from the power sector for both Cambodia and Thailand compared with the BAU scenario. In Cambodia, the CO2 emission reduction from the power sector in CT500, CCS, RE3, CT100, RE1, RE2 and EV scenarios would be 32.94%, 32.61%, 30.86%, 27.54%, 15.17% and 12.77%, respectively, in 2050 when compared with the BAU scenario. On the other hand, it is noticed that the electricity demands in all scenarios are the same except in the EV scenario. In the EV scenario, the electricity demand is expected to increase 0.17% in 2050, which is used for EV substitution if compared with the BAU scenario. In Thailand, CO2 emission from the power sector in the BAU scenario is predicted to increase by 37.28% from 2015 to 2050. Thus, the CO2 emission reduction was 39.8%, 27.3%, 24%, 21.83%, 13.35%, 11.76% and 11.46 in CT500, CT100, CCS, RE, EV, RE1 and RE2 scenarios as compared to the BAU scenario. Nevertheless, the electricity demand in the EV scenario will increase by 2.6% when compared with the BAU scenario. However, the costs of electricity production in all renewable energy scenarios are still lower than the CCS and carbon tax scenarios.