GHG Mitigation in Power Sector: Analyzes of Renewable Energy Potential for Thailand's NDC Roadmap in 2030

Thailand has submitted the Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) to the United Nations Framework Conventional on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 20 percent from the business-as-usual (BAU) level by 2030. According to the Thailand's Power Development Plant (PDP2015) renewable energy (RE) is one of the key aspects of energy related environmental planning for Thailand. It plays an important role in GHG mitigation. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the potential of RE to reduce GHG emissions for Thailand's NDC roadmap in the power sector compared to the target of Thailand's PDP2015 through the Long-range Energy Alternative Planning (LEAP) model. The LEAP is employed to analyze future energy demand and emissions in the long-term planning during 2010-2030. The mitigation scenario offers sustainable potential of RE such as solar, wind, biomass, nuclear, hydropower, MSW and biogas. Four mitigation scenarios under RE were modeled. Mitigation 1 follows the PDP2015 and has 3 scenario options which are PDP1a (100% RE share in 2030), PDP1b (50% RE share in 2030) and PDP1c (25% RE share in 2030). Thailand's NDC plan is applied in mitigation 2 (NDC2) with the reduction of GHG emissions by 20% in 2030 when compared to BAU. Results show that, in the BAU scenario electricity demand will increase to 26,163 ktoe and GHG emissions will increase to 175,118 kt-CO_2eq in 2030. By adopting mitigation, total GHG emissions in 2030 can be mitigated by 41.69% in PDP1a, 23.75% in PDP1b, 13.60% in NDC2 and 10.40% in PDP1c when compared to the BAU. This result implies that Thailand have high potential to reduce GHG emissions by using RE and can achieve Thailand's NDC target in 2030, even if they meet only a half of its RE target.