Accounting for spatiality of renewables and storage in transmission planning

TL;DR

This paper evaluates alternative approaches to German energy system planning by modeling spatial and temporal renewable generation, showing that integrating storage and considering localized renewables can reduce reliance on grid expansion.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed capacity expansion model that incorporates spatiality, storage, and cross-border exchange, providing new insights into optimizing renewable energy deployment and grid planning.

Findings

Storage integration can substitute for grid expansion in congestion management.

Localized renewable deployment has limited impact due to exploitation of available potential.

Grid expansion can be replaced at tolerable costs when storage is considered.

Abstract

The current governance process to plan the German energy system omits two options to substitute grid expansion: First, placing renewables closer to demand instead of where site conditions are best. Second, utilizing storage instead of additional transmission infrastructure to prevent grid congestion. In the paper, we apply a comprehensive capacity expansion model based on the AnyMOD modelling framework to compare the status quo to alternative planning approaches for a fully renewable energy system. To represent spatiality and fluctuations of renewables, the German electricity sector is modelled with great spatio-temporal detail of 32 NUTS2 regions and hourly time-steps. In addition to the German electricity sector, analysis also accounts for exchange of energy with the rest of Europe and demand for electricity and electricity-based fuels, like hydrogen or synthetic gases, from the industry, transport, and heat sector. The results reveal that a first-best solution can be well approximated if the current planning approach also considered storage for congestion management. Placing renewables different has no significant effect in our case, because the available potential must be exploited almost entirely leaving little room for optimization. Furthermore, a sensitivity on the first-best scenario prohibiting additional transmission lines entirely suggests that grid expansion can be substituted at tolerable costs.