11,8-100% Rural Renewable Energy and Power Supply and its Influence on the Luxembourgish Power System

Abstract

Abstract Currently, the majority of countries tries to reduce their dependency on fossil fuels by the introduction of renewable resources in their energy systems. In the following the relatively small Luxembourgish electricity system is analysed (0.55 Mio Inhabitants). Current power-system-models mainly focus on larger systems, due to the unavailability of specific consumption-data. Prices and effects on the Luxembourgish power system of different supply scenarios for rural-private households are analysed. A linear optimisation for the minimum-cost of the power-supply of a village with the following renewable energy resources: wind- (max.100 kW), solar-PV- and hydrokinetic-power is made. The electricity-demand scales with the number of inhabitants and agricultural-consumers. The wind-power-potential differs with the location of the village. The solar-radiation is assumed to be the equal over the country, due to the small size of approximately 80 by 50 km. The hydrokinetic turbines complete the supply where a village is located close to a river. The minimum cost of the specific village power-supply is the result of the optimization. The installation- and maintenance-cost of each renewable technology are considered. The whole number of a rural Luxembourgish model villages private households is considered and their electricity contribution to the system is estimated for different renewable energy supply scenarios, namely from 20% to 100% renewable-energy-scenarios. For each scenario the power exchanged from the village to the grid is calculated in 15-min-steps for 9-years, the amount differs widely with the number of applied generation technologies. Due to the high share of imported electricity of about 80% in the recent years, every consideration of national power generation does not harm the supply security. Luxembourg is a good model country to analyse the high share of distributed, renewable generators, due to its structure of rural and civic regions and their effects on a central European region with a high electricity-consumption.