Abstract
Measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are often considered separately, in terms of electricity, heating, transport, and industry. This can lead to the measures being prioritised in the wrong sectors, and neglects interactions between the sectors. In addition, studies often focus on specific greenhouse gas reduction targets, despite the uncertainty regarding what targets are desirable and when. In this paper, these issues are examined for the period after 2030 in an existing openly-available, hourly-resolved, per-country, and highly-renewable model of the European energy system, PyPSA-Eur-Sec-30, that includes electricity, land transport, and space and water heating. A parameter sweep of different reduction targets for direct carbon dioxide emissions is performed, ranging from no target down to zero direct emissions. The composition of system investments, the interactions between the energy sectors, shadow prices, and the market values of the system components are analysed as the carbon dioxide limit changes. Electricity and land transport are defossilised first, while the reduction of emissions in space and water heating is delayed by the expense of new components and the difficulty of supplying heat during cold spells with low wind and solar power generation. For deep carbon dioxide reduction, power-to-gas changes the system dynamics by reducing curtailment and increasing the market values of wind and solar power. Using this model setup, cost projections for 2030, and optimal cross-border transmission, the costs of a zero-direct-emission system in these sectors are marginally cheaper than today’s system, even before the health and environmental benefits are taken into account.
Highlights
Many studies have focused on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in the electricity sector.Typically, the studies that restrict to renewable energy sources examine the flexibility requirements for high levels of variable renewable energy (VRE) generation, with flexibility options that include dispatchable renewables, storage, demand-side management, and grid expansion [1,2,3,4,5,6]
We address the deficiencies in the literature identified above by considering an existing European energy model, PyPSA-Eur-Sec-30 [29], that includes current electricity demand, land transport, and space and water heating at an hourly time resolution and with one node per European country, connected by cross-border transmission
The greenfield cost optima with no CO2 constraint or pricing already result in a large CO2 reduction, largely due to new installations of combined heat and power (CHP) fired by natural gas and around a 50% share of renewables in the electricity supply
Summary
Many studies have focused on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions in the electricity sector.Typically, the studies that restrict to renewable energy sources examine the flexibility requirements for high levels of variable renewable energy (VRE) generation, with flexibility options that include dispatchable renewables, storage, demand-side management, and grid expansion [1,2,3,4,5,6] (see [7] for a survey of studies with very high penetrations of VRE). Energies 2019, 12, 1032 as well as ignoring sources of flexibility from, for example, delayed charging of electric vehicles, power-to-gas, or thermal energy storage. Such flexibility options could help to integrate renewables and mitigate the decline in market value of VRE as their penetration increases, which has been observed in several studies [9]. Multi-day winter wind lulls with high heat demand were shown to be critical to driving up costs, but high costs could be mitigated by power-to-gas and long-term thermal energy storage technologies
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