Transmission needs across a fully renewable European power system

By Rolando A. Rodriguez, Sarah Becker, Gorm Bruun Andresen, D. Heide, Martin Greiner. 2013

233 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The residual load and excess power generation of 30 European countries with a 100% penetration of variable renewable energy sources are explored in order to quantify the benefit of power transmission between countries. Estimates are based on extensive weather data, which allows for modelling of hourly mismatches between the demand and renewable generation from wind and solar photovoltaics. For separated countries, balancing is required to cover around 24% of the total annual electricity consumption. This number can be reduced down to 15% once all countries are networked together with unconstrained interconnectors. The reduction represents the maximum possible benefit of transmission for the countries. The total Net Transfer Capacity of the unconstrained interconnectors is roughly 11.5 times larger than current values. However, constrained interconnector capacities 5.7 times larger than the current values are found to provide 98% of the maximum possible benefit of transmission. This motivates a detailed investigation of several constrained transmission capacity layouts to determine the export and import capabilities of countries participating in a fully renewable European electricity system.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Energy Engineering and Power Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d4c1c3a28f7b73d2467e3850ebfb54e77eba21b5

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In Control and Systems Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Is a 100% renewable European power system feasible by 2050? (2019, unknown): “[46,47]), or averaged across all sites (e.”
Integration of Renewable Energy Sources in future power systems: The role of storage (2014, background): “The respective data series for both production and load have also been used in previous publications by other authors, [5, 8, 14, 16, 21].”
Flexible electricity generation, grid exchange and storage for the transition to a 100% renewable energy system in Europe (2019, background): “[35] 2014 2050 AU model Transition Higher investments in transmission interconnections can”
Cost optimal scenarios of a future highly renewable European electricity system: Exploring the influence of weather data, cost parameters and policy constraints (2018, background): “newable generation, large-scale power transmission capacities play a decisive role to provide a smoothing eect and to connect generation capacity at favorable distant locations with the load centres [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. Given the complexity of such a system, in particular with respect to th”
Response to ‘Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems’ (2017, methodology): “The authors quote studies that look at optimal cross-border transmission capacity in Europe at very high shares of renewables, which show an expansion of 4-6 times today’s capacities [82, 124].”
The benefits of cooperation in a highly renewable European electricity network (2017, methodology): “In [7, 12] similar non-linear effects of transmission were found in a more simplified model of a highly renewable European electricity system without a limit on CO2 emissions, without storage or hydroelectricity, and without optimising transmission and generator capacities.”
Features of a fully renewable US electricity system: Optimized mixes of wind and solar PV and transmission grid extensions (2014, methodology): “Compared to the corresponding scenario for Europe, the isolated nodes (countries in the European case) have to balance around 24% of the total load, which drops to around 15% in the aggregated case, thus a reduction by about two fifths [25].”
On the History and Future of 100% Renewable Energy Systems Research (2022, background): “that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [”