Abstract
Variable renewable energy sources (VRES) will be the cornerstones of future energy supply systems. Nevertheless, their inherent intermittency remains an obstacle to their widespread deployment. Renewably-produced or ‘green’ hydrogen has been suggested as an energy carrier that could account for this in a sustainable manner. In this study, a fully VRES-based European energy system in the year 2050 is designed using an iterative minimal cost-optimization approach that ensures robust supply security across 38 weather-year scenarios (1980–2017). The impact of different power generation locations is factored in by defining exclusive VRES groups within each optimization region. From this, it can be seen that higher numbers of groups in each region offer cheaper electricity generation locations to the optimizer and thus decrease the system's total annual costs. Furthermore, the robust system design and impact of inter-annual variability is identified by iteratively combining the installed capacities of different system designs derived through the application of the 38 historical weather years. The system design outlined here has significantly lower capacities in comparison to the maximum regional capacities obtained in the first round of optimization.
Highlights
Despite the shift towards renewable energy sources [1,2], the intermittency of variable renewable energy sources (VRES) such as wind and solar remains an issue that could be solved by employing chemical energy carriers [3]
After investigating the number of groups to be used in the analysis, the robust design was attained by applying the iterative approach explained in Section 2.2, with the system design assessed as the second main part of the results section
This work proposes an iterative approach to attain a robust, fully renewable European energy system design that takes into account the high spatial resolution of renewable modeling, as well as different design results on the basis of historical weather years
Summary
Despite the shift towards renewable energy sources [1,2], the intermittency of variable renewable energy sources (VRES) such as wind and solar remains an issue that could be solved by employing chemical energy carriers [3]. Such chemical energy carriers can be produced at peak power generation periods and used in other sectors such as transport (as fuel) [4], electricity (for grid balancing) or industry (as feedstocks) enabling so-called ‘sector coupling’ [5,6,7,8]. Including hydrogen storage and conversion in their analysis, Bussar et al [28,29,30] designed a potential future European energy system; the transmission of hydrogen between regions was not addressed
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