European Electricity Grid Infrastructure Expansion in a 2050 Context

Jonas Egerer, Clemens Gerbaulet, and Casimir Lorenz

The Energy Journal, 2016, vol. Volume 37, issue Sustainable Infrastructure Development and Cross-Border Coordination

Abstract: This paper analyzes the development of the European electricity transmission network for different policy scenarios at the horizon 2050. We apply a bottom-up techno-economic electricity sector model to determine transformation scenarios of the European electricity sector. It has a very detailed spatial disaggregation that allows for a fine representation of domestic and international electricity flows and transmission expansion. The cost-minimizing mixed-integer model calculates investments for time steps of ten years. The model results indicate that network requirements are lower than generally assumed. The largest share are domestic upgrades, rather than country interconnectors. Most investments (20bn EUR) occur in the near future, by 2030 the latest. Only the high-mitigation scenarios require large additional network investments. The timing and location of investments differ, depending on generation scenarios and cost assumptions for inter-connectors. The results indicate that carbon emission reduction targets alone provide insufficient information for long-term network planning.

JEL-codes: F0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=2830 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aen:journl:ej37-si3-egerer

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejsearch.aspx

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal from International Association for Energy Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Williams ().