Balancing Renewables and Carbon Capture in Emerging Economies: A Decarbonization Pathway for ASEAN

Emerging economies such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) face rapid electricity demand growth alongside increasingly ambitious decarbonization targets. Yet, their power systems remain strongly dependent on coal and natural gas fleets. Here we show that carbon capture can play a critical system-level role in enabling high solar photovoltaic penetration in the ASEAN region by providing dispatchable low-carbon generation that reduces renewable curtailment and storage requirements. Using an established linear optimization framework with new enhancements that allow for explicitly modeling carbon capture retrofits alongside new carbon capture installations and cross-border transmission expansion, we find that carbon capture deployment cuts solar PV curtailment by more than half by 2050, while costs can be lowered by retrofitting existing power plants. Our results highlight carbon capture as a complementary flexibility resource rather than a competing mitigation option to renewables, with broader implications for decarbonizing power systems in emerging economies with large existing fossil fleets.

Renewable energies, Energy system modelling, Carbon capture, Retrofitting, ASEAN

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