Designing a sector-coupled European energy system robust to 60 years of historical weather data.

As energy systems transform to rely on renewable energy and electrification to mitigate climate change, they encounter stronger year-to-year variability in energy supply and demand. Yet, most infrastructure planning relies on a single weather year, risking a potential lack of robustness. In this paper, we optimize capacity layouts for a European energy system under net-zero CO emissions for 62 different weather years.

Using Modeling All Alternatives to explore 55% decarbonization scenarios of the European electricity sector.

Climate change mitigation is a global challenge that, however, needs to be resolved by national-level authorities, resembling a "tragedy of the commons". This paradox is reflected at the European scale, as climate commitments are made by the EU collectively, but implementation is the responsibility of individual Member States. Here, we investigate a suite of near-optimal effort-sharing scenarios where the European electricity sector is decarbonized between 55% and 75% relative to 1990, in line with 2030 ambitions.

Dataset: A proxy for historical CO emissions related to centralised electricity generation in Europe.

This paper presents data for the estimation of carbon dioxide (CO) emissions resulting from public generation of electricity in the period from 1990 to 2018 in European countries. The base data used in the calculation of the proxy are the national emissions reported to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the European Union (EU) Greenhouse Gas Monitoring Mechanism. Subsequently, this data is compiled and held by the European Environment Agency (EEA) from where it is accessed.

Early decarbonisation of the European energy system pays off.

For a given carbon budget over several decades, different transformation rates for the energy system yield starkly different results. Here we consider a budget of 33 GtCO for the cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from the European electricity, heating, and transport sectors between 2020 and 2050, which represents Europe's contribution to the Paris Agreement. We have found that following an early and steady path in which emissions are strongly reduced in the first decade is more cost-effective than following a late and rapid path in which low initial reduction targets quickly deplete the carbon budget and require a sharp reduction later.

A high-resolution hydro power time-series model for energy systems analysis: Validated with Chinese hydro reservoirs.

We expand the renewable technology model palette and present a validated high resolution hydro power time series model for energy systems analysis. Among the weather-based renewables, hydroelectricity shows unique storage-like flexibility, which is particularly important given the high variability of wind and solar power. Often limited by data availability or computational performance, a high resolution, globally applicable and validated hydro power time series model has not been available.