Abstract
This final chapter aims at distilling key issues for the move towards sustainable electricity systems. Thereby, the focus is on greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement in the context of the current trends of decentralisation, digitisation as well as acceptance and participation. The general decision alternatives and challenges in decarbonisation are addressed first. Then, more specifically, three domains are scrutinised where specific challenges arise: balancing supply and demand, grid operation and development and prosumer integration and network tariffication. For each field, key challenges are identified followed by the technical solutions available or still to be developed. Then, regulatory and market-based concepts for overcoming the challenges are discussed along with political and societal aspects to be addressed. Against this setting, modelling approaches are highlighted that may be used to provide decision support – referring here as in the earlier sections back to the corresponding sections of the previous chapters. To conclude, some key insights are proposed – not with the intention to provide definitive answers on the issues at stake, but rather to indicate starting points to the readers for their in-depth investigations.
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Notes
- 1.
See Sect. 6.2 for a discussion why this is difficult.
- 2.
We use the technical term decarbonisation here being aware that the ultimate target is a defossilisation.
- 3.
The broad range of required emission reduction refers to the 10th and 90th percentiles of the scenarios of the IPCC (2014).
- 4.
Inertia is a property of (rotating) masses such as large synchronous generators in conventional power plants. It may be understood as a resistance to any change in velocity. As such it limits the short-term impact of imbalances between power supply and demand for electric power systems. This is similar to the effect of the mass of a car (or other vehicle) when the brakes are activated: the inertia associated with the mass of the car prevents the car from stopping immediately under the action of the brakes – and ditto the speeding up under the effect of the accelerator is limited.
- 5.
The interested reader is referred to Zipf (2021, Chap. 6), where the topic of reserve dimensioning is quantitatively assessed.
- 6.
Of course, also so-called “renewable pull” – meaning that the availability of renewable power attracts new industries (e.g. the high renewable energy availability in Brandenburg is sometimes referred as one important factor for the location selection of the Tesla factory, however, energy is likely to be just a minor factor in this decision) – can result in an increased demand close to attractive renewable sites. Although, renewable pull is an interesting research field from various research perspectives, the effects on the energy system are limited, so that they are not further elaborated here.
- 7.
NIMBY characterizes an opposition or resistance by residents against proposed developments in their local area.
- 8.
Not only redispatch related to grid necessities can result in curtailment, also a market-based curtailment may happen, if e.g. electricity prices are below zero.
- 9.
For example in Germany, congestions in the grids especially occur for the transport of energy from north (high wind capacity) to south. Consequently, grid extensions are planned (documented in the grid development plans) and are to be realized to a large extent by new HVDC corridors from north to south (see also Sects. 5.1.1.2 and 5.1.3.2).
- 10.
Static VAR compensators are electrical devices for providing fast-acting reactive power on high-voltage electricity transmission networks. VAR indicates that reactive power is provided as it just refers to the unit Volt-Ampere Reactive. The term static expresses that the compensation takes place without the use of rotating machines such as three-phase synchronous machines in phase shifter operation.
- 11.
Switzerland has a very high share of hydropower generation, including numerous small-scale plants. Further studies may investigate to what extent the Swiss approach is thus transferable to other countries in Europe and beyond.
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Weber, C., Möst, D., Fichtner, W. (2022). Moving Towards Sustainable Electricity Systems. In: Economics of Power Systems. Springer Texts in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97770-2_12
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