Mod­el­ing the Euro­pean power sec­tor evo­lu­tion: low-​​carbon gen­er­a­tion tech­nolo­gies (renew­ables, CCS, nuclear), the elec­tric infra­struc­ture and their role in the EU lead­er­ship in cli­mate pol­icy — MERCURY

The reduc­tion of green­house gas emis­sions is a vital tar­get for the com­ing decades. From a tech­nol­ogy per­spec­tive, power gen­er­a­tion is the largest respon­si­ble for CO2 emis­sions, there­fore great mit­i­ga­tion efforts will be required in this area. From a pol­icy per­spec­tive, it is com­mon opin­ion that the Euro­pean Union is and will remain leader in imple­ment­ing clean poli­cies. Bas­ing on these con­sid­er­a­tions, the power sec­tor and the Euro­pean Union will be the two key actors of this project. The main tool adopted in this work will be WITCH, the inte­grated assess­ment model devel­oped at Fon­dazione Eni Enrico Mat­tei (FEEM).
The descrip­tion of the power gen­er­a­tion sec­tor in WITCH is quite detailed, but needs to be inte­grated, espe­cially as far as the elec­tric infra­struc­ture down­stream the power gen­er­a­tion sys­tem is con­cerned. In the first half of the project, devel­oped at the out­go­ing host, the mod­el­ing of the elec­tric sec­tor will thus be com­pleted and refined. In par­tic­u­lar, four main aspects need to be assessed: i) sys­tem inte­gra­tion (i.e. the issues related to the non-​​negligible pen­e­tra­tion of inter­mit­tent renew­ables in the grid), ii) elec­tric­ity stor­age, iii) elec­tri­cal grid, and iv) elec­tric­ity trade.
In the sec­ond half of the project, devel­oped at the return host, the improved WITCH model will be employed in sce­nario assess­ment cal­cu­la­tions. Firstly, the prospects in Europe of renew­ables, CCS and nuclear will be analysed. In par­tic­u­lar, atten­tion will be focused not so much on the pure tech­nol­ogy aspects, but rather on pol­icy issues such as the role of incen­tives in renew­able dif­fu­sion, the slow CCS deploy­ment, or the effects of the nuclear reac­tors age­ing, or of their phase-​​out. Sec­ondly, the focus will move on assess­ing the role of these tech­nolo­gies (and the con­se­quent evo­lu­tion of the elec­tric infra­struc­ture) accord­ing to dif­fer­ent mit­i­ga­tion sce­nar­ios, and in par­tic­u­lar con­sid­er­ing dif­fer­ent lev­els of global par­tic­i­pa­tion in EU-​​led cli­mate mitigation.

About this project:

MERCURY is a project within the Marie Curie Euro­pean Global Fel­low­ships (IF-​​GF) scheme for Expe­ri­enced Researchers of the Hori­zon 2020 research and inno­va­tion frame­work pro­gramme. The project is devel­oped by Dr. Samuel Car­rara, under the direct sci­en­tific super­vi­sion of Dr. Mas­simo Tavoni. The out­go­ing phase is hosted by Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, under the super­vi­sion of Prof. Daniel Kam­men.