Typical periods or typical time steps? A multi-model analysis to determine the optimal temporal aggregation for energy system models

TL;DR

This study compares methods for reducing temporal resolution in energy system models, finding that the optimal aggregation technique depends on the model's structure and specific storage considerations.

Contribution

It provides a systematic evaluation of typical time steps versus typical periods for temporal aggregation in energy models, highlighting their suitability based on model characteristics.

Findings

Typical time steps outperform typical days in clustering indicators.

Aggregation methods' effectiveness varies with storage technology inclusion.

Choice of aggregation depends on the model's mathematical structure.

Abstract

Energy system models are challenged by the need for high temporal and spatial resolutions in or-der to appropriately depict the increasing share of intermittent renewable energy sources, storage technologies, and the growing interconnectivity across energy sectors. This study evaluates methods for maintaining the computational viability of these models by ana-lyzing different temporal aggregation techniques that reduce the number of time steps in their in-put time series. Two commonly-employed approaches are the representation of time series by a subset of single (typical) time steps, or by groups of consecutive time steps (typical periods). We test these techniques for two different energy system models that are implemented using the Frame-work for Integrated Energy System Assessment (FINE) by benchmarking the optimization results based on aggregation to those of the fully resolved models and investigating whether the optimal aggregation method can, a priori, be determined based on the clustering indicators. The results reveal that typical time steps consistenly outperform typical days with respect to cluster-ing indicators, but do not lead to more accurate optimization results when applied to a model that takes numerous storage technologies into account. Although both aggregation techniques are ca-pable of coupling the aggregated time steps, typical days offer more options to depict storage oper-ations, whereas typical time steps are more effective for models that neglect time-linking con-straints. In summary, the adequate choice of aggregation methods strongly depends on the mathematical structure of the considered energy system optimization model, and a priori decisions of a sufficient temporal aggregation are only possible with good knowledge of this mathematical structure.