Sub-session A - Advancing Sustainable Energy Transitions: Integrated Modelling and Assessment of Renewable Energy Systems
This sub-session focuses on energy system modelling and integrated assessment to understand and optimise interactions within modern energy systems, supporting decisions that improve energy security, economic viability, and minimise environmental impact. It covers system retrofitting and integration of renewables (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and hydrogen), including hydrogen’s role in storage and key applications, and its integration with small-scale generation and advanced grid management. It also addresses social and environmental effects, trade-offs, and co-benefits (communities, jobs, land use, ecological impacts), and strategies for sustainable planning and management that enhance co-benefits and mitigate land-use conflicts.
Sub-session B - Supporting the Just Transition of Coal Regions: From Legacy to Sustainability
This sub-session focuses on scientific, technological, and socio-economic research to support the just transition of coal and lignite regions, ensuring environmental restoration, economic revitalization, and social equity. It covers closure, remediation, and sustainable redevelopment of coal mines and infrastructure, including adaptive reuse, environmental restoration (e.g., water and biodiversity), ground stability and subsidence risk management, and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane, from abandoned and closing mines. It also covers valorisation of mining waste and residues, CCUS in former coal regions, and geothermal systems on repurposed mine sites.
Sub-session C - Pathways to real zero and their policy implications
This sub-session examines pathways to “real zero”, fully eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels across the energy system and other key sectors, rather than relying on CCS or CDR to compensate for continued emissions as in common “net zero” framings. It covers evidence on the technical, financial, and social implications of real-zero pathways, including hard-to-abate sectors (steel, shipping, aviation, fertilizers, chemicals) and options including process change, electrification, fuel switching, efficiency, circularity, and demand reduction. It also addresses residual emissions, costs and permanence risks, land and resource constraints, LTS accounting and reporting, safeguards against over-reliance on CCS/CDR, and equity and just transition considerations.