Pathways to Decarbonize Honduras’ Power Sector

The bulk of global greenhouse gas emissions in the following decades will come from rising living standards in emerging economies. To address this coupled challenge, low-emission development strategies are essential to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions while jointly allowing developing countries to increase resilience. However, there has been a widespread policy gap between the long-term strategies needed to achieve net zero emissions and proposed national electrical planning documents. Honduras, historically one of the most climate-vulnerable countries, committed to decarbonizing by 2050 but expects an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from current levels across all scenarios in its national electricity planning strategy. We develop a capacity expansion model to analyze a range of alternative pathways to enable low-cost energy transitions, identifying economically feasible emission reduction pathways in the electrical sector. Our results show that an unrestricted, low-cost expansion scenario increases installed renewable capacity to 80% while delivering significantly more affordable electricity than current national expansion pathways. A deep decarbonization scenario dispatches renewable energy resources with a small cost premium of 9.60 $/MWh without implementing carbon pricing or carbon sequestration technologies. Affordable pathways align Honduras’ energy sectoral planning with needed global long- and medium-term decarbonization and climate change strategies.