Modelling macroeconomic impacts of the energy technology transition

The energy transition is often framed as a technological challenge. In practice, it is also an economic transformation that reshapes industrial activity, investment patterns, and trade competitiveness. These changes propagate through supply chains and labour markets and affect key macroeconomic indicators. Anticipating these effects is central to long-term planning and policy design, and requires modelling approaches capable of capturing both technological detail and economy-wide interactions. This thesis advances the macroeconomic modelling of the energy transition. It introduces hydrogen-related activities into a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model ex ante and improves the representation of low-carbon fuels within the model’s structure. The thesis further refines the linking between energy system and CGE models by improving how transition-related spending is translated and allocated across economic sectors. The resulting modelling framework is applied to the Netherlands as a case study to examine how the energy transition may affect the Dutch economy under realistic policy and deployment constraints. The analysis provides novel insights into the macroeconomic impacts of such a transition and shows how these impacts can shift between positive and negative under different assumptions.