RES-DEGREE – Towards an Energy System in Europe Based on Renewables

The goal is to analyse the renewable energy development within Europe on the basis of a detailed energy system analysis of every single country including the interaction between those. The main focus of this project is to carry out a long-term scenario analysis for two systems and to evaluate outcomes, challenges and problems for the large-scale integration of renewable energies into both systems. The findings could be used for stakeholders in the energy planning sector in political and industrial decisions.

The project RES-DEGREE investigates in detail the electricity systems of Greece and Germany in the context of high penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources (RES) with the exploration of possible interconnecting paths in order to maximize complementarity between these two countries and maximize the capacity and use of intermittent RES. The two countries have a great and complementary potential of new renewables. This implies that RES power generation will not be correlated and therefore a common balancing strategy could provide synergies. The complementarity of resource availability is greatly beneficial for system reliability and economics provided that the two countries can be integrated from a systems perspective in the wider regional interconnected power system.

Exploiting such potential requires regional cooperation within a well-functioning internal EU energy market and possibly additional investment in interconnections. Such exploitation will allow a maximal cost effective contribution of renewables in the timeframe until 2050. The aim is to quantify in detail the technical and economic parameters through modelling and impacts of such an enhanced German-Greek power system integration in the context of very high penetration of renewables for power generation.

The coupling of the two models contributes to obtain a complete overview of the entire energy system. The PRIMES energy system model provides for the European system determining demand, prices, etc. under different scenario contexts, whereas the regionally and temporally more disaggregated model RESlion can provide regional disaggregation of power generation portfolios of and within countries. The model calculates:

• Power plant investment and dispatch
• Storage investment and dispatch
• Renewable energy distribution
• Transmission capacity planning of the high voltage grid

Both models simulate the regional interconnected system within the internal energy market context including power flow allocation of interconnecting capacities enhanced by undertaking extensions and new investment. Grid extension is accounted for both countries with RESlion. PRIMES is modelling the remaining EU-27 countries, as power models for the single countries are already included.