Abstract
Greenhouse gas emissions need to be drastically reduced to mitigate the environmental impacts caused by climate change, and to lead to a transformation of the European energy system. A model landscape consisting of four final energy consumption sector models with high spatial (NUTS-3) and temporal (hourly) resolution and the multi-energy system model ISAaR is extended and applied to investigate the transformation pathway of the European energy sector in the deep emission mitigation scenario solidEU. The solidEU scenario describes not only the techno-economic but also the socio-political contexts, and it includes the EU27 + UK, Norway, and Switzerland. The scenario analysis shows that volatile renewable energy sources (vRES) dominate the energy system in 2050. In addition, the share of flexible sector coupling technologies increases to balance electricity generation from vRES. Seasonal differences are balanced by hydrogen storage with a seasonal storage profile. The deployment rates of vRES in solidEU show that a fast, profound energy transition is necessary to achieve European climate protection goals.
Highlights
To mitigate the environmental impacts caused by climate change, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be drastically reduced worldwide, leading to a change in energy supply and consumption
The model landscape deployed for modeling European scenarios at high spatial and temporal resolutions is composed of the four final energy consumption (FEC) models and a multi-energy system model
The analysis will focus on aggregated results for the 27 + 3 regions and the distribution of volatile renewable energy sources (vRES) capacities on NUTS-3 level
Summary
To mitigate the environmental impacts caused by climate change, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must be drastically reduced worldwide, leading to a change in energy supply and consumption. Concrete transformation pathways of the energy systems that achieve such large reductions in GHG emissions are often modeled on a small scale. An isolated national perspective is short-sighted, and it does not do justice to the complexity of the problem, especially in a highly interconnected energy system such as Europe. A first but insufficient step to take account of the strong interconnection is to include the electrical interdependencies between neighboring countries, such as in [1,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]
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