Industry’s role in Japan’s energy transition: soft-linking GCAM and National IO table with extended electricity supply sectors

Japan’s energy transition towards carbon neutrality by 2050 will require a shift from fossil fuel energy on the energy supply side. The introduction of new power generation capacities and infrastructures will then lead to increasing demand for materials and industrial products. To capture such industrial energy service demand, we conducted a soft-linking between an integrated assessment model (GCAM) with an input–output framework (IONGES), considering both inter-model and inter-period iteration. The results show that: i) the industrial final energy under the carbon neutrality scenario would be 0.2-0.7EJ more after linking, which is almost the gap between the carbon neutrality and the reference scenario; ii) to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, more power generation capacities would be introduced in the near-term periods (2020-2030), bringing additional growth afterward. Our soft-linking approach emphasized the role of industries in the energy transition and explored how industries can benefit from an increasingly low-carbon energy supply.