Abstract
The urgency to combat climate change and the widely distributed, increasingly competitive renewable resources in North America are strong arguments to explore scenarios for a renewable energy supply in the region. While the current power system of North America is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, namely natural gas, coal and oil, and some nuclear power plants, some current policies at the state level, and future federal policies are likely to push the share of different renewable sources available in Mexico, the U.S., and Canada. This paper explores three scenarios for a renewable energy supply, using a bottom-up energy system model with a high level of spatial and time granularity. The scenarios span the extremes with respect to connecting infrastructure: while one scenario only looks at state-level supply and demand, without interconnections, the other extreme scenario allows cross-continental network investments. The model results indicate that the North American continent (a) has sufficient renewable potential to satisfy its energy demand with renewables, independent of the underlying grid assumption, (b) solar generation dominates the generation mix as the least-cost option under given renewable resource availability and (c) simultaneous planning of generation and transmission capacity expansion does not result in high grid investments, but the necessary flexibility to integrate intermittent renewable generation is rather provided by the existing grid in combination with short-term and seasonal storages.
Highlights
Before political leaders from all over the world gathered for the CopenhagenSummit in 2009, Jacobson and Delucchi [1] published an article with a roadmap towards a worldwide, 100 percent renewable energy system by 2030
The detailed regional generation results from scenario FIX are highly similar to scenario EXP and are not depicted, indicating that transmission grid expansion does not have a strong impact on the spatial allocation of Renewable Energies (RE) generation
Solar generation is favored throughout all scenarios and dominates the generation mix with an overall generation of 4141 terawatt hours (TWh) in EXP and
Summary
Before political leaders from all over the world gathered for the CopenhagenSummit in 2009, Jacobson and Delucchi [1] published an article with a roadmap towards a worldwide, 100 percent renewable energy system by 2030. The overall capacity of Renewable Energies (RE) has been gradually increasing and several countries have committed to ambitious climate targets since today’s total energy supply is still primarily met by fossil fuels and the world is facing a prevailing, massive emission gap in reaching the Paris Climate agreement [2,3]. As the current scientific and public debate discusses several mitigation options for the energy sector, the recent scientific research on a large-scale deployment of RE suggests that RE are becoming more cost-efficient than electricity generation from fossil fuels, even without including the social cost of carbon emissions and including the intermittent nature of RE [4]. The framework for power generation is gradually changing towards increasing shares of RE, as in the recent Clean Power Plan announced by the upcoming Biden administration or California’s target to reach 100 percent renewable electricity generation by 2045. There is growing research regarding power systems based on 100 percent RE
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