Long-term Energy Demand in the German Residential Sector: Development of an Integrated Modelling Concept to Capture Technological Myopia

This thesis deals with the topic of how technological knowledge declines over time, and the resulting limitation of techno-economic energy demand models to anticipate the future demand for energy in the context of long-term scenarios. Since this is a principle limitation of ex ante analyses, this deficiency has been discussed for some time, but so far no methodological solution has been developed. This thesis is the first to develop a concept that draws on a broad methodological basis from different scientific disciplines (energy modelling and innovation economics) to address this limitation. Applying the developed concept to a practical question - energy scenarios for the German household sector until 2050 - shows that integrating the decline of technological knowledge leads to interesting new insights.