The benefits of cooperation in a highly renewable European electricity network

By David P. Schlachtberger, Tom Brown, S. Schramm, Martin Greiner. 2017

286 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To reach ambitious European CO2 emission reduction targets, most scenarios of future European electricity systems rely on large shares of wind and solar photovoltaic power generation. We interpolate between two concepts for balancing the variability of these renewable sources: balancing at continental scales using the transmission grid and balancing locally with storage. This interpolation is done by systematically restricting transmission capacities from the optimum level to zero. We run techno-economic cost optimizations for the capacity investment and dispatch of wind, solar, hydroelectricity, natural gas power generation and transmission, as well as storage options such as pumped-hydro, battery, and hydrogen storage. The simulations assume a 95% CO2 emission reduction compared to 1990, and are run over a full historical year of weather and electricity demand for 30 European countries. In the cost-optimal system with high levels of transmission expansion, energy generation is dominated by wind (65%) and hydro (15%), with average system costs comparable to today's system. Restricting transmission shifts the balance in favour of solar and storage, driving up costs by a third. As the restriction is relaxed, 85% of the cost benefits of the optimal grid expansion can be captured already with only 44% of the transmission volume.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0eb4457151dd9e526e466773fe8bbb362f869072

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

The role of storage technologies throughout the decarbonisation of the sector-coupled European energy system (2019, unknown): “[9] assumed a fixed 6 hours ratio for batteries, which is very similar to the 5.”
Status and perspectives on 100% renewable energy systems (2019, background): “The value of cross-border integration is increasingly investigated with multi-node models to show that the cooperation between neighbouring countries is a further means to achieving flexibility across a larger geographic entity, which allows a more efficient utilization of infrastructure and capacit”
Tightening EU ETS targets in line with the European Green Deal: Impacts on the decarbonization of the EU power sector (2021, background): “Examples of the latter are e.g. [6], who analyse the system adequacy of various 100% renewable power system setups for Europe in 2050; [7], who focus on a greenfield analysis of combinations of variable renewable energy shares and CO2 prices to achieve a given level of CO2 emission reductions for a ”
On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research (2022, methodology): “[114] C. Sapart, ‘‘CCU as a solution to mitigate climate change: State of the art and perspectives,’’ in Proc.”
PyPSA-Eur: An open optimisation model of the European transmission system (2018, methodology): “The simplified in-flow time series is generated as in [40, 43] by aggregating the total potential energy at height hx relative to ocean level of the run-off data Rx in each country c by Gc (t) = N ∑”
Synergies of sector coupling and transmission reinforcement in a cost-optimised, highly renewable European energy system (2018, background): “It was shown in [13] that the benefits of transmission are highly non-linear: volumes of transmission interconnection only a few times bigger than today’s can already lock-in many of the benefits of international integration.”
Cost optimal scenarios of a future highly renewable European electricity system: Exploring the influence of weather data, cost parameters and policy constraints (2018, methodology): “The model presented in [11] applies a linear techno-economic optimisation of total annual costs:”
Flexible electricity generation, grid exchange and storage for the transition to a 100% renewable energy system in Europe (2019, result): “Two studies that examined scenarios that resulted in 95% GHG emissions for Europe also offer comparable results [89,90].”
PyPSA: Python for Power System Analysis (2017, methodology): “These range from basic small-scale networks demonstrating the features of PyPSA, to a one-node-per-country model of the European power system with high shares of renewables [62], to full transmission network models available as open data from the SciGRID [63] and GridKit projects [64], [65] which we”