The key role of sufficiency for low demand-based carbon neutrality and energy security across Europe.

A detailed assessment of a low energy demand, 1.5 C compatible pathway is provided for Europe from a bottom-up, country scale modelling perspective. The level of detail enables a clear representation of the potential of sufficiency measures.

The Energy Return on Investment of Whole-Energy Systems: Application to Belgium.

Planning the defossilization of energy systems while maintaining access to abundant primary energy resources is a non-trivial multi-objective problem encompassing economic, technical, environmental, and social aspects. However, most long-term policies consider the cost of the system as the leading indicator in the energy system models to decrease the carbon footprint. This paper is the first to develop a novel approach by adding a surrogate indicator for the social and economic aspects, the (EROI), in a whole-energy system optimization model.