Thread by @timtroendle

Continental or local? 100% renewable electricity supply in Europe can be both. But cost and especially required infrastructure differ.

Read our new @Joule_CP study: doi.org/10.1016/j.joul….

With @JLilliestam @stemarelli @stefpf @IASS_Potsdam @ETH.

HIGHLIGHTS BELOW👇

Larger is certainly cheaper: continental supply, which uses only the best resources all over Europe, leads to lowest cost. But it concentrates generation infrastructure (💨and☀️), requires a powerful transmission grid, and creates import dependencies.

Local supply in ~500 European regions distributes generation infrastructure equally and requires less than half the transmission capacity but 50% more generation capacity in total. This is because 💨 and ☀️ have varying quality in the regions.

Cost, however, is only 20% higher in the regional compared to the continental case, as long as renewable fluctuations can be balanced anywhere in Europe, not only within regions. This requires more cross-border transmission capacities 🟨 and strong cooperation across countries.

Many forms of fully renewable electricity supply are possible in Europe with very different impact on necessary infrastructure and thus on landscapes and dependencies between regions and countries — but not so much on cost. Infrastructure is important for future decision-making!

You may think: Future technology cost is highly uncertain 🔮. Our results, however, are robust towards this uncertainty. Nevertheless, uncertainties of discount rate and cost of bioenergy and onshore wind capacities have the biggest impact.

Total Sobol’ indices 👇

Sidenote on methods:

To perform the uncertainty analysis, we ran our models 100,000s of times — despite the models being computationally hard to run. This was only possible due to the powerful #UQLab developed under supervision of @stemarelli and @sudret_uq.

Result data and the #snakemake workflow to reproduce result data are openly available doi.org/10.5281/zenodo… and doi.org/10.5281/zenodo….
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