Much has happened since our last newsletter. Energy security has become a pressing issue in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In response to this situation, the EU Commission, through its REPowerEU plan, has vowed to accelerate the energy transition. In this context, openENTRANCE's work is evermore important, to help understand the challenges ahead of us in realising the energy transition.
Flexibility options for the future EU energy system
On November 2, 12:00-16:00, there will be an online workshop where highlights from the case studies of openENTRANCE will be presented. Discussions will be held with relevant stakeholders on each case study. Some of the topics touched will be:
- Demand response – behaviour of individuals: What is the potential flexibility from demand response from household consumers and what is its impact on the integrated European electricity system cost, operation and investments needs?
- Impact of communities of actors: How will partly self-supplied communities of actors impact the power system? What is their impact on the system at the European level?
- Flexibility of batteries and pumped hydro storage: How can batteries balance future variable wind and solar power production? What are the consequences on the Pan-European power system of an increased pumped-hydro storage capacity for the Iberian Peninsula and Norway?
OpenENTRANCE's macroeconomic analyses
An open workshop will be held in Brussels on 11 October to present the macroeconomic analyses carried out as part of the project. This workshop will be tailor-made for policy-makers and stakeholders.
The programme for this workshop will be announced towards the end of the summer.
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Quantitative Scenarios for the Low-Carbon Futures of the European Energy System on Country, Region and Local Level
The Deliverable D3.2, «Quantitative Scenarios for the Low-Carbon Futures of the European Energy System on Country, Region and Local Level», was released this spring and is available on the openENTRANCE website. In this deliverable, we present updates of pan-European scenario results, together with selected highlights of European country-specific and region-specific scenario results, as well as consistent and coherent results on local community, neighbourhood and individual building level.
The scope of this deliverable includes two main aspects: First, the final openENTRANCE scenario model runs were performed both at the pan-European level and at the level of individual European countries. This was done after making selective improvements to the input data and refinements to the energy system model GENeSYS MOD, based on the findings from the results of the "draft" energy system decarbonization scenario results at the pan-European level (Deliverable D3.1). The figure below gives a taste of results from the final runs.
Figure: Selected model results from the scenario "Directed Transition" 2050
Second, the development of consistent and coherent methods and algorithms to break down country-specific GENeSYS MOD modeling results across the different geographic aggregation levels to the smallest administrative unit level such as municipalities, districts, neighbourhoods, buildings, and finally to the individual end-user. To our knowledge, there has not yet been the ambition to conduct concrete energy system analyses to achieve specific climate goals across all levels of aggregation in a consistent and very concrete manner down to the individual end user.
These kinds of "last mile" to end-user analyses, presented in Deliverable D3.2, are becoming increasingly important to get a sense of how to respond in very concrete ways to future climate challenges in practice. Input and output data for all European countries for four low emission scenarios towards 2050 will be made publicly available. GENeSYS-MOD is an open-source energy system model. Information about GENeSYS-MOD, including the full source code, example data set, as well as documentation can be found here: https://git.tu-berlin.de/genesysmod/genesys-mod-public
OpenENTRANCE includes 9 case studies about different challenges of the transition to a low carbon energy system. The purposes of doing the studies are to demonstrate the functionality of The Open Platform as well as to develop new knowledge. All case studies are described on the web page.
The development of new urban areas can lead to costly investments in the electricity distribution grid to ensure sufficient capacity to meet new demand in the area. This demand includes electricity-specific demand and electricity for heating purposes, which in Norway represents an important share. Simultaneously, many large scale sources of heat remain unused. The case study 6 is set in this context. The Furuset area, near Oslo, is set to grow significantly in the next decades to host new housing and businesses, leading to a potentially underdimensioned distribution grid. At the same time, large amounts of heat from waste disposal are lost in the summer due to low demand. Case study 6 investigates the economic viability of the installation of a seasonal storage of this waste heat to supply the new demand in Furuset, and its impact on the need for grid upgrades.
Various forms of seasonal storage of heat exist. In this study, Borehole Thermal Energy Storage (BTES) is considered. This technology uses boreholes drilled in the ground to store heat in the surrounding rock formation for long periods of time. In Furuset, 390 boreholes of 200m are considered, which would provide a storage capacity of 13GWh of heat. To store excess heat to the BTES and supply it to end users, the system needs to connect to the local district heating (DH) network. The figure below schematically represents the energy system modelled in the case study.
The economic viability of three alternatives is analysed:
- Grid reinforcement and direct electric heating
- Connection to the DH network
- DH network and BTES
The Integrate tool developed by SINTEF Energy was used for this analysis.
Results indicate that while not cost optimal, DH and BTES reduce peak power demand by respectively 28% and 31%. Higher electricity prices, like the ones experienced in 2021 and 2022 in the south of Norway, make BTES an even more attractive option. An additional benefit of the BTES is a reduction of emissions of the local energy system of 20% compared to electric heating.
You can read more about the case study in the recently published article Assessing the potential of seasonal thermal storage for local energy systems: Case study for a neighborhood in Norway in Elsevier Smart Energy.
We are happy to announce that openENTRANCE has released a new report, D5.1, about "Analysis framework, functional specification of models, and conceptual assessment of the linkages among them defined in the Case Studies and Pathways". The report is available on the openENTRANCE website.
Don't forget that openENTRANCE is now on Zenodo. Project papers have now been uploaded to the open-access repository Zenodo*. Zenodo was developed under the European OpenAIRE program and is operated by CERN. It allows researchers to deposit scientific papers, data sets, research software, reports and any other research related digital artifacts. For each submission, a persistent digital object identifier (DOI) is minted, which makes the stored items easily citeable (the system also makes it possible to use a preexisting DOI, if the publication already has one).
The openENTRANCE papers are grouped together under the openENTRANCE community, which is linked to from the openENTRANCE website's publications section.
We encourage researchers who upload openENTRANCE content to Zenodo to use the openENTRANCE community marker. This can easily be done when uploading content, by typing "openENTRANCE" in the text field under "Communities". This can also be done after the fact, for content that has already been uploaded, by the person who originally uploaded the content.
*subject to the paper's copyright terms allowing it.
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