Renewable energy expansion and interaction in Europe: High resolution of RES potentials in energy system modeling

Abstract

This paper describes a new approach of integrating renewable energy sources (RES) and their potentials into an energy system model. To enable detailed national results for the European electricity system on a sub-national level for Germany and Greece, an approach is developed to implement many technology specific classes of RE potentials for small subnational regions into an optimization model for the European electricity market (RESlion-Europe). The RES potentials for wind onshore and photovoltaic (PV) are evaluated by using a geographical information system (GIS) to integrate specific information about land cover, weather data and specific land use of each technology. By defining five different weather classes per model region, an improved site selection for RE power plants in the optimization model is possible. With this approach, modeling results for the European electricity market are constrained by suitable land for RES, regional hourly weather profiles and distributed electricity generation from RES.