CO₂mitigation in Thailand’s low-carbon society: The potential of renewable energy

This study aims at the development of Thailand’s low-carbon society in 2030 by using the Asia-Pacific Integrated Model/Extended Snap Shot model for analysis of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation through renewable energy (RE) utilization. This article presents the potentials of RE in power generation, industrial, and transport sectors in Thailand for GHG mitigation in 2030. The deployment of the RE sources is used in the analyses with potentials of mini-hydro of 390 MW, wind power of 960 MW, solar power of 600 MW, biomass energy of 4,400 MW, biogas power of 144 MW, waste to power of 192 MW, bioenergy of 4,634 ktoe, and RE for thermal of 8,088 ktoe in 2030. According to the proposed development, the amount of GHG emissions is estimated based on business-as-usual (BAU) without mitigation measures and countermeasures with GHG mitigation options of adopted RE technologies available during 2005–2030. Results show that annual GHG emissions in the base year of 2005 are 185,983 kt-CO2. In 2030 the GHG emissions in the BAU scenario will increase to 563,730 kt-CO2 or 3.03 times higher than the base year 2005. The GHG emissions in the 2030 can be decreased dramatically to 443,043 kt-CO2, and accounted for 21.4% of GHG reduction by deployment of RE technologies.