Tillväxt och energikonsumtion

Sammanfattning: Energy is an important component in production. Today, energy comes from mainly non-renewable resources such as petrol and coal, which carry with them negative externalities on climate, which in turn affects human life and long term growth. To prevent this climate change the utilization of these resources needs to be reduced. This can be done by replacing non-renewable resources with renewable resources, such as solar energy or wind power. Renewable energy has great potential, but is expensive today. Technological development in renewable energy will optimize and can increase use. The Solow model with non-renewable resources has been developed and modified for this thesis, so that effects on economic growth when using non-renewable can be compared with effects when using renewable resources. The model is tested by simulations of feasible future scenarios. The results demonstrate that improvement in non-renewable technology will lead to greater economic growth than the same improvement in renewable technology. However, externalities from non-renewable resources are not included in the model and the results are sensitive to which energy type is dominant in the production, which is not static, but depends on e.g. relative prices and public will