Modeling all alternative solutions for highly renewable energy systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to identify all near-optimal solutions in highly renewable energy systems, enabling a comprehensive understanding of trade-offs among technical and socioeconomic objectives.

Contribution

It presents a new approach to determine the continuum of near-optimal solutions, shifting energy system modeling from discrete to continuous solution analysis.

Findings

Near-optimal solutions form a relatively flat region, allowing flexibility.

Solutions slightly more expensive can improve equality, land use, and implementation time.

The method is demonstrated on the European electricity system model.

Abstract

As the world is transitioning towards highly renewable energy systems, advanced tools are needed to analyze such complex networks. Energy system design is, however, challenged by real-world objective functions consisting of a blurry mix of technical and socioeconomic agendas, with limitations that cannot always be clearly stated. As a result, it is highly likely that solutions which are techno-economically suboptimal will be preferable. Here, we present a method capable of determining the continuum containing all techno-economically near-optimal solutions, moving the field of energy system modeling from discrete solutions to a new era where continuous solution ranges are available. The presented method is applied to study a range of technical and socioeconomic metrics on a model of the European electricity system. The near-optimal region is found to be relatively flat allowing for solutions that are slightly more expensive than the optimum but better in terms of equality, land use, and implementation time.