Three stages in the co-transformation of the energy and mobility sector

Abstract

Renewable electricity sources such as wind and solar have shown a remarkable development in terms of efficiency, costs and availability, but system integration still remains a challenge. Realizing a fully renewable electricity supply will require large scale storage technologies and flexible users to overcome long periods of low power generation. At the same time, other sectors such as mobility and industry must be electrified to replace fossil fuels. Power-to-Methane is a promising technology as it enables large-scale energy storage and sector coupling using existing infrastructures. In this work, we analyze the co-transformation of the German electricity, mobility and industry sector taking into account the recent decisions for coal phase out until 2038. We evaluate the necessary capacities of renewables and storage sizes as well as system costs and associated emissions using a techno-economic optimization model with a high technological and temporal resolution in the open source framework OSeMOSYS. We find three rather different stages of the transformation driven by the decreasing emission gap and the coal phase out. Solar power is expanded vastly until 2030, then coal is replaced mainly by fossil natural gas until 2040. Emission caps become very challenging afterwards such that all flexibility options are greatly expanded: Storage, curtailment and flexible Power-to-Methane.