Quantifying the Impact of Energy System Model Resolution on Siting, Cost, Reliability, and Emissions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that high-resolution energy system models improve siting, emissions, reliability, and cost accuracy, highlighting the importance of detailed modeling for better policymaking and planning.

Contribution

It quantifies how model resolution impacts key outcomes, showing that increased granularity enhances decision quality without diminishing returns.

Findings

High resolution leads to more accurate siting recommendations.

Errors from low resolution are more significant in multiple dimensions.

Increasing resolution improves accuracy across key metrics without diminishing returns.

Abstract

Energy systems models, critical for power sector decision support, incur non-linear memory and runtime penalties when scaling up under typical formulations. Even hardware improvements cannot make large models tractable, requiring omission of detail which affects siting, cost, and emission outputs to an unknown degree. Recent algorithmic innovations have enabled large scale, high resolution modeling. Newly tractable, granular systems can be compared with coarse ones for better understanding of inaccuracies from low resolution. Here we use a state of the art model to quantify the impact of resolution on results salient to policymakers and planners, affording confidence in decision quality. We find more realistic siting in recommendations from high resolution energy systems models, improving emissions, reliability, and price outcomes. Errors are generally stronger from low spatial resolution. When models have low resolution in multiple dimensions, errors are introduced by the coarser of temporal or spatial resolution. We see no diminishing returns in accuracy for several key metrics when increasing resolution. We recommend using computationally efficient techniques to maximize granularity and allocating resolution without leaving any aspect (spatial, temporal, operational) of systems unduly coarse.