Robust Design of a Future 100% Renewable European Energy Supply System with Hydrogen Infrastructure

Abstract

In light of the latest trends in global installed capacities, the importance of variable renewable energy sources (VRES) to future energy supply systems is evident. Despite this, the inherent intermittency of VRES remains an obstacle to their widespread adoption. Green hydrogen is often suggested as an energy carrier that can account for this in a sustainable manner. In the analysis, a robust European energy system in the context of 2050 and with 100% VRES energy supply is designed through an iterative minimal cost-optimization approach that ensures robust security of supply over 38 weather-year scenarios (1980-2017). The impact of spatial VRES variability is factored in by defining exclusive VRES groups within each optimization region and, from this, it can be seen that higher numbers of groups in each region offer cheap electricity generation locations to the optimizer and thus decrease the total annual cost of the system. Beyond this, the robust system design and impact of inter-annual variability is identified by iteratively combining the installed capacities of different system designs obtained by applying 38 historical weather years. The robust system design outlined here has significantly lower capacities in comparison to the maximum regional capacities obtained in the first round of optimization.

Power-to-Ships: Future electricity and hydrogen demands for shipping on the Atlantic coast of Europe in 2050

“…The energy system definition employed here is the same as in the work of Caglayan et al 2021 [44], where it is explained in detail; therefore, a brief description of their energy system concept is presented here. For the regional boundaries of Europe, 96 regions were considered in accordance with the e-Highway project [45].…”

“…For the regional boundaries of Europe, 96 regions were considered in accordance with the e-Highway project [45]. In each region, energy carriers can be generated, consumed, converted or stored using the same technologies as proposed in Caglayan et al 2021 [44], as is shown in Fig. 1.…”

“…Finally, Caglayan et al 2021 [44] designed a European hydrogen infrastructure to supply electricity and H 2 in a 100% renewable energy scenario for 2050. The electricity was based on the e-Highway "100% RES" project [45] but substituted J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f electric vehicles with FCEVs.…”

The Potential of Variable Renewable Energy Sources in Mexico: A Temporally Evaluated and Geospatially Constrained Techno-Economical Assessment

“…The technologies' annual operational costs (OPEX), as percentages of the PV CAPEX, and economic service lives were kept the same as the ones suggested by the corresponding costing methodology. The weighted average cost of capital (WACC) was fixed at 8% for all technologies to maintain consistency with similar assessments [24,32,42,57]. Regional differences in technology costs and access were not considered in the costing procedure.…”

Wind-to-Hydrogen Production Potential for Selected Sites in Pakistan

“…The quest of finding a lasting solution to pollution-free clean air environment has led to the formulation of various policies and agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement by all stake holders across the globe [1], [2]. Due to technological advancement in most developed countries, the demand for energy to sustain these buoyant economies such as extraction of gas hydrogen and liquid hydrogen from wind power and their techno-economic analysis, offshore oil and gas exploration has seen an upward trajectory in the last few decades [3]- [5]. Unlike developing countries, these giant economies have exploited various medium of energy generation to meet their demand during peak hours.…”