Open Access

Amelie Schischke

• To keep the climate change under control, 196 parties signed the legally binding, international treaty on climate change, the Paris Agreement (2015), in which they committed themselves to limit global warming. A crucial part on the way to CO2 neutrality is the decarbonization of the energy sector, whereby renewable energy technologies like wind power and photovoltaic systems, associated storage technologies as well as building renovations are key elements for the energy transition. However, the built-up of these technologies requires huge amounts of raw materials, see Valero et al. (2018), which is why the question arises whether enough resources are available. While from a geological point of view, enough mineral raw materials seem to be available, see Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (2022a), the increased resource requirements can lead to (short-term) shortages, and therefore to price peaks. Hereby, this thesis analyzes the resource scarcity risks of fourTo keep the climate change under control, 196 parties signed the legally binding, international treaty on climate change, the Paris Agreement (2015), in which they committed themselves to limit global warming. A crucial part on the way to CO2 neutrality is the decarbonization of the energy sector, whereby renewable energy technologies like wind power and photovoltaic systems, associated storage technologies as well as building renovations are key elements for the energy transition. However, the built-up of these technologies requires huge amounts of raw materials, see Valero et al. (2018), which is why the question arises whether enough resources are available. While from a geological point of view, enough mineral raw materials seem to be available, see Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (2022a), the increased resource requirements can lead to (short-term) shortages, and therefore to price peaks. Hereby, this thesis analyzes the resource scarcity risks of four potential transformation pathways of the German Energiewende. Therefore, we propose and apply a new framework to assess the resource scarcity risk under the consideration of the substitutability of commodities, the actual future required resource amounts of the project as well as the commodity market structure, using new commodity market models, reflecting the impact of fundamentals on - as well as the spillover effects between - commodity prices. In the empirical application, we first apply the commodity market models on the industrial metals markets. The results indicate the framework is able to showcase the strong co-movement in commodity prices as well as the simultaneous impact of the economy on all commodity markets. Moreover, various spillover effects of commodity-specific supply and demand, both within and across commodity markets, as well as their impact on prices, underline the importance to account for fundamentals, but also to jointly model commodity markets. Subsequently, we incorporate the commodity market models in the scarcity risk assessment framework to analyze the resource requirements of four transformation pathways for the German Energiewende. Hereby, the results indicate on commodity level cobalt, indium and nickel, followed by copper and lithium, mainly allocated to energy storage, solar photovoltaics (PV) technologies and wind parks, bear the highest scarcity risks, and therefore, will be the key commodities for the German Energiewende. The comparison of the four transformation paths, suggests the path which models the transition of the German energy system with full support by the society, shows the lowest scarcity risks, as an active support of the German population for the energy transition significantly reduces the required amounts of raw materials and therefore the scarcity risks. Various robustness analyses underline the main finding that a reduced energy demand combined with a resource-optimal energy system decreases the resource scarcity.…