Tackling uncertainties post-2030: cross-sectoral infrastructure demands to ensure the Austrian "Klimawende"

Recently published pathways on Austrian climate neutrality ([BMF 2022], [Anderl et. al. 2023], [Schmidt et al. 2023], [Steininger et al. 2021], [BMK 2024b]) highly agree on short term requirements: significant expansion of renewables, conversion to electric drives, switching to renewable based heating systems (esp. heat pumps), and to renewable production technologies in industry. The former three are the lower-hanging fruits to be harvested by 2030 to keep Austria on track for achieving its climate goals. For the longer term – beyond 2030 –, however, these studies diverge – implying crucial uncertainties – and leave blind spots. INFRA-ENSURE is to fill these gaps, will identify no-regret actions and derive policy implications. In particular, the lengthy planning and construction timelines for infrastructure necessitate early decision-making to ensure its timely availability and alignment with climate neutrality goals. INFRA-ENSURE will distill the shared infrastructure demands across different pathways and thus deliver a robust decision basis and explore the relative advantages, plausible scales and order of investment requirements of major alternatives. Improving our understanding of post 2030 pathways and respective infrastructure needs therefore requires a systematic and comprehensive assessment of all involved energy consumption sectors, which in turn requires advancing state-of-the-art energy system models in combination with tools that are able to capture economy-wide effects. This is the assessment that INFRA-ENSURE will carry out.