Risk assessment of the low-carbon transition of Austria’s steel and electricity sectors

Abstract To limit global temperature increase below +2°C, societies need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions radically within the next few decades. Amongst other mitigation measures, this requires transforming process-emission intensive industries towards emission neutrality. One way to this end is the renewables-based electrification of industries. We present results of a recent co-production process which brought together stakeholders from industry, policy, administration and science to co-create climate-neutral transition pathways for the steel and electricity sectors in Austria. The results summarized here are the definition of reliable pathways and the identification of associated risks pertaining to pathway implementation, including a macro-economic quantification. We find that risks to implementation (barriers) are at least as important as risks of implementation (negative consequences). From the quantitative analysis we find that, provided that barriers can be reduced, macroeconomic costs of the transition are only moderate and that stakeholders might overestimate risks, when neglecting economy-wide feedbacks.