Cost optimal scenarios of a future highly renewable European electricity system: Exploring the influence of weather data, cost parameters and policy constraints
By David P. Schlachtberger, Tom Brown, Mirko Schafer, S. Schramm, Martin Greiner. Energy, 2018
149 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Cost optimal scenarios derived from models of a highly renewable electricity system depend on the specific input data, cost assumptions and system constraints. Here this influence is studied using a techno-economic optimisation model for a networked system of 30 European countries, taking into account the capacity investment and operation of wind, solar, hydroelectricity, natural gas power generation, transmission, and different storage options. A considerable robustness of total system costs to the input weather data and to moderate changes in the cost assumptions is observed. Flat directions in the optimisation landscape around cost-optimal configurations often allow system planners to choose between different technology options without a significant increase in total costs, for instance by replacing onshore with offshore wind power capacity in case of public acceptance issues. Exploring a range of carbon dioxide emission limits shows that for scenarios with moderate transmission expansion, a reduction of around 57% compared to 1990 levels is already cost optimal. For stricter carbon dioxide limits, power generated from gas turbines is at first replaced by generation from increasing renewable capacities. Non-hydro storage capacities are only built for low-emission scenarios, in order to provide the necessary flexibility to meet peaks in the residual load.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a68f6dac2b6917dc224d8532ea5766c9cd378b95
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Citations in the corpus
- Getting to Zero Carbon Emissions in the Electric Power Sector (2018, background): “36 Schlachtberger et al.(9) 2018 Cost optimal scenarios of a future highly renewable Energy Europe E O zero CO2 res.”
- The role of storage technologies throughout the decarbonisation of the sector-coupled European energy system (2019, unknown): “In [46], 4 years of weather data were used to analyse the system sensitivity, and the cost of the power sector was found to be stable, although extensive sensitivity analysis to weather data such the one in [48] are desirable.”