Kornelis Blok

Delft University of Technology | TU · Delft Energy Initiative

UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2024: No more hot air … please! is the 15th edition in a series that brings together many of the world’s top climate scientists to look at future trends in greenhouse gas emissions and provide potential solutions to the challenge of global warming. As climate impacts intensify globally, the report finds that nations must...

Although causal evidence synthesis is critical for the policy sciences—whether it be analysis for policy or analysis of policy—its repeatable, systematic, and transparent execution remains challenging due to the growing volume, variety, and velocity of policy-relevant evidence generation as well as the complex web of relationships within which poli...

Indonesia has large renewable energy resources that are not always located in regions where they are needed. Sub-sea power transmission cables, or island links, could connect Indonesia’s high-demand islands, like Java, to large-resource islands. However, the role of island links in Indonesia’s energy transition has been explored in a limited fashio...

Indonesia has large renewable energy resources that are not always located in regions where they are needed. Sub-sea power transmission cables, or island links, could connect Indonesia’s high-demand islands, like Java, to large-resource islands. However, the role of island links in Indonesia’s energy transition has been explored in a limited fashio...

Background: At the COP21, cities were recognised as key actors in combatting climate change. In supporting cities, climate city networks such as transnational climate networks (TCNs) and national climate networks (NCNs) have emerged to enable cities in building capacities and formulating climate policy whilst also encouraging citizen engagement and...

Renewable electricity generation will need to be rapidly scaled to address climate change and other environmental challenges. Doing so effectively will require an understanding of resource availability. We review estimates for renewable electricity of the global technical potential, defined as the amount of electricity that could be produced with c...

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) is an emerging renewable energy technology using the ocean’s heat to produce electricity. Given its early development stage, OTEC’s economics are still uncertain and there is no global assessment of its economic potential, yet. Here, we present the model pyOTEC that designs OTEC plants for best economic perfor...

Wave energy is a rich and highly accessible renewable energy resource, that has largely been under-developed. Studies from the sector have tried to show the potential of benefits wave energy in “simple cases” or via small hybrid systems, the large scale incorporation of wave energy has not yet been fully investigated. Our approach uses a fully dyna...

Although causal evidence synthesis is critical for the policy sciences – whether it be analysis for policy or analysis of policy – its repeatable, systematic, and transparent execution remains challenging due to the growing volume, variety, and velocity of policy-relevant evidence generation as well as the complex web of relationships within which...

Corporate climate initiatives such as the Science-Based Targets initiative and RE100 have gained significant prominence in recent years, with considerable increases in membership and several ex-ante studies stating how they could bring substantive emissions reductions beyond national goals. However, studies evaluating their progress are scarce, rai...

High-temperature heat pumps (HTHPs) are an emerging technology to improve overall process efficiency and reduce energy demand while enabling a switch from fossil fuels to renewable electricity. New industrial HTHP technologies aim to achieve an output heat temperature of 250 °C, suitable for decarbonising the food and beverages industry considering...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive analysis of the carbon footprint of the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), including direct and indirect emissions from utilities, logistics and purchases, as well as a discussion about the commonly used method. Emissions are presented in three scopes (scope 1 reports direct pr...

Onshore wind potentials are commonly mapped with site selection criteria that either fully include or exclude land for wind farms. However, current research rarely addresses the variability of these criteria, possibly resulting in overly conservative or optimistic potentials. This paper proposes a method to account for the variability of site selec...

Many questions remain regarding the exploitation of wave energy and its interaction with our energy systems. Particularly about their likely role in future multi-renewable power systems, given the resource’s abundance, predictability, and high energy density. The objective of this paper is to present the expansion of the renewable energy capabiliti...

The current focus of offshore wind industry and academia lies on regions with strong winds, neglecting areas with mild resources. Photovoltaic’s cost reduction has shown that even mild resources can be harnessed economically, especially where electricity prices are high. Here we study the technical and economic potential of offshore wind power in I...

The Working Group III (WG III) contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) assesses literature on the scientific, technological, environmental, economic and social aspects of mitigation of climate change. The report reflects new findings in the relevant literature and builds on previous IPCC reports, including the WG III contribution t...

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) is a promising renewable energy technology that is the most economical at large scale. But contemporary literature does not address how OTEC could reach such scale with current technology, and what the techno-economic impact of location-dependent factors and technological learning are. This paper tackles these...

Purpose of Review This paper reviews recent literature on the combined use of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) in the industries of steel, cement, paper, ethanol, and chemicals, focusing on estimates of potential costs and the possibility of achieving “negative emissions”. Recent Findings Bioethanol is seen as a potential near-ter...

Indonesia has an increasing electricity demand that is mostly met with fossil fuels. Although Indonesia plans to ramp up Renewable Energy Technologies (RET), implementation has been slow. This is unfortunate, as the RET potential in Indonesia might be higher than currently assumed given the archipelago’s size. However, there is no literature overvi...

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) produces electricity using the temperature difference between warm surface and cold deep seawater. Despite a gigantic theoretical potential of up to 44 PWh worldwide, OTEC is still at an early development stage and many countries cannot benefit from OTEC's clean and predictable baseload power yet. In a series...

Wave energy is one of the most dense, predictable , and persistent energy sources, that has gone under-utilised, with many countries exposed to it. Depending on orientation with regards of coastal fronts to swells, resources can be characterised as high, moderate, and low. Wave energy can provide significant benefits as renewables acquire more shar...

A dynamic and fast-changing environment brings challenges for generating long-term scenarios. Although the need to update scenarios for decision-making is recognized, a structured way for executing this process remains unclear. To configure a solution, we propose two concepts that need to be introduced: 1) that scenarios consist of a multi-layered...

There is significant emission reduction potential in the Dutch vegetable oil and fat industry, which consists of seven companies each producing more than 10 kt CO2 per year, emitting a total of 0.36 Mt CO2 In et al., 2018. Marginal Abatement Cost (MAC) curves are constructed to provide an overview of the most cost-effective decarbonisation options....

The decarbonization of concrete production will require a multi-pronged approach including the abatement of CO2 emissions from cement production as well as storage of CO2 within concrete itself. This study explores the decarbonization potential of combining bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (CCS) during cement production with the accelerated...

Future national electricity, heating, cooling and transport systems need to reach zero emissions. Significant numbers of back-up power plants as well as large-scale energy storage capacity are required to guarantee the reliability of energy supply in 100 percent renewable energy systems. Electricity can be partially converted into hydrogen, which c...

Wave energy can provide significant benefits as renewables acquire more share in electricity production. So far focus for the development of wave energy is given to areas with resources ≥ 25 kW/m, with moderate resources often not considered. Furthermore, waves have larger uncertainties associated with diverse portfolio of converters leading to hig...

Indonesia strives for a renewable energy share of 23% by 2025. One option to contribute to this goal is Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC). Despite a global theoretical potential of up to 30 TW, its economically deployable share remains unknown. This paper proposes a novel methodology, which enables to determine OTEC’s economic potential for an...

This dataset lists all sites that are practically suitable for OTEC deployment in Indonesia based on seawater temperature difference, water depths and marine protected areas. The columns of the dataset are as follows: Prov_Start, Long_Start, and Lat_Start described the province, longitude and latitude of the site for OTEC deployment in the ocean....

The bottom-up approach of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the Paris Agreement has led countries to self-determine their greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets. The planned ‘ratcheting-up’ process, which aims to ensure that the NDCs comply with the overall goal of limiting global average temperature increase to well below...

Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) is a Renewable Energy Technology (RET) with a global theoretical potential of up to 30 TW. However, OTEC's economic potential is unknown as it is still an immature technology with no commercial plant operating. This paper reviews recent academic and industrial literature since 2005 to provide an overview and c...

This paper explores the potential of achieving negative emissions in steelmaking by introducing bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) in multiple steelmaking routes, including blast furnace and HIsarna smelt reduction, and Midrex and ULCORED direct reduction. Process modelling and life cycle assessment were used to estimate CO2 balances...

Limiting climate change below a given temperature will require fundamental changes in the current energy system, both in the energy supply and the energy demand sectors. Previous global model-based analyses, however, have focused mostly on energy supply transformations. Therefore, in this study we respond to this knowledge gap by analysing the futu...

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of greenhouse gas emission reduction potentials for 2030 based on the assessment of detailed sectoral studies. The overview updates a previous assessment that dates back more than ten years. We find a total emission reduction potential of 30–36 GtCO2e compared to a current-policies baseline of 61 Gt...

The transition towards low-carbon thermal energy systems requires solid information provision to support both public and private decision-making, which is future proof and optimal in the context of the system dependencies. We adopt a data ecosystem approach to answer the following research question: How can a data ecosystem be analyzed and develope...

Cities around the world are gearing up to play a major role in climate change mitigation. However, concrete results e significant emissions reductions, expected from cities committed to mitigating climate change, are currently conspicuously absent. While there are several good practice guides available for large/mega cities there are little availab...

Cost-optimal electricity system configurations with increasing renewable energy penetration were determined in this article for six islands of different geographies, sizes and contexts, utilizing photovoltaic energy, wind energy, pumped hydro storage and battery storage. The results of the optimizations showed strong reasoning for islands to invest...

A recent article ‘Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems’ claims that many studies of 100% renewable electricity systems do not demonstrate sufficient technical feasibility, according to the criteria of the article's authors (henceforth ‘the authors’). Here we analyse the authors’ methodolog...

This article identifies and quantifies the 10 most important benchmarks for climate action to be taken by 2020–2025 to keep the window open for a 1.5°C-consistent GHG emission pathway. We conducted a comprehensive review of existing emissions scenarios, scanned all sectors and the respective necessary transitions, and distilled the most important s...

In the Netherlands, the CO2 Performance Ladder has been introduced as an energy management programme to facilitate continuous energy efficiency and carbon performance improvement in non-industrial sectors. This paper addresses the question: ‘What is the impact of the CO2 Performance Ladder on improving energy and carbon management and reducing CO2...

This paper describes the Climate Initiatives Database and develops criteria that can be used to more reliably assess the effectiveness of initiatives. Analysis of the contribution these initiatives can make to climate mitigation could play an important role in encouraging national governments to pledge more ambitious commitments in the run-up to CO...

This report presents results of a study conducted to assess the potential for efficient district heating and high-efficient cogeneration of heat and power (CHP) in Austria. The study was conducted on be-half of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Economics and aims at supporting the authorities to fulfill the reporting duties related to th...

Corporate climate action is increasingly considered important in driving the transition towards a low-carbon economy. For this, it is critical to ensure translation of global goals to greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets at company level. At the moment, however, there is a lack of clear methods to derive consistent corporate target sett...

Prospects for the integration of power markets and the expansion of renewable energy have recently triggered a number of publications dealing with transformation scenarios of the North African electricity systems. This paper compares five studies using economic electricity supply- and demand models to assess possible development pathways of the Nor...

Energy management and carbon accounting schemes are increasingly being adopted as a corporate response to climate change. These schemes often demand the setting of ambitious targets for the reduction of corporate greenhouse gas emissions. However, only limited empirical insight is available regarding the companies’ target-setting process and the au...

In order to achieve a certain impact, like the reduction or limitation of greenhouse gas emissions, governments can apply policy instruments. Three elementary mechanisms to influence human behavior can be distinguished: providing information, setting rules and regulations, and providing economic incentives. Based on these mechanisms, a wide variety...

The current project-based carbon market mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the Joint Implementation (JI) do not have a direct impact on global greenhouse gas emission levels, because they only replace or offset emissions. Nor do they contribute to host country׳s national greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. Contribut...

For several reasons, the world needs an adapted energy system to accommodate its growing population: Climate change, depletion of natural resources, and a growing dependence on only a few energy suppliers are a threat to our current system. Renewable energy sources are therefore necessary for a sustainable balance. With emphasis on detailed develop...

Pulp and paper industry is facing challenges such as resource scarcity and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The objective of this research is to investigate whether the use of new coatings (micro or nano TiO2) and different pulp types could bring savings in wood, energy, GHG emissions and other environmental impacts in comparison with conventional p...