Suchergebnisse

Atmospheric Sciences; Marine & Freshwater Sciences; Environmental Management

e-harbours is a unique European project that was set out to identify viable energy business cases on the exploitation of energy flexibility, which optimise their operations to match energy demand and supply while taking account of the additional volatility in supply caused by renewable energy sources, improve energy efficiency, and reduce dependence on fossil fuels. In this paper, we propose an integrated multi-criteria decision analysis based framework to assess the relative performance of 21 energy business cases, which implemented different demand-side management strategies. Our proposed methodology has the ability to address complex problems involving multiple conflicting interests from various stakeholders, different forms of data, and different fuzzy and crisp relations. We find that business cases based on contract optimisation and offering reserve capacity were ranked relatively high, while those based on trading on the wholesale market or hybrid approaches fared less well. Despite finding viable pilot business cases, e-harbours found that there was little enthusiasm among industrial partners to scale up the pilots. Consequently, EU governments should consider offering attractive incentive programmes for industry engagement in achieving their objectives in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving energy supply security, diversifying energy supplies, and improving Europe's industrial competitiveness.

Abstract. The influence of climate change on storm surges including increased mean sea level change and the associated insurable losses are assessed for the North Sea basin. In doing so, the newly developed approach couples a dynamical storm surge model with a loss model. The key element of the approach is the generation of a probabilistic storm surge event set. Together with parametrizations of the inland propagation and the coastal protection failure probability this enables the estimation of annual expected losses. The sensitivity to the parametrizations is rather weak except when the assumption of high level of increased mean sea level change is made. Applying this approach to future scenarios shows a substantial increase of insurable losses with respect to the present day. Superimposing different mean sea level changes shows a nonlinear behavior at the country level, as the future storm surge changes are higher for Germany and Denmark. Thus, the study exhibits the necessity to assess the socio-economic impacts of coastal floods by combining the expected sea level rise with storm surge projections.

The twenty-eight member states of the European Union have agreed upon ambitious targets that address climate change, energy security and economic competitiveness. Can "smart energy networks" help to speed up the energy transition? This question has been the focus of the e-harbours project, formed by eight partners from seven harbours located in five countries around the North Sea. Large industrial cities and harbour areas, with a dense variety of production and consumption processes, are a perfect testing ground for smart energy concepts. The aim of e-harbours is to explore the possibilities for large-scale implementation of smart energy networks, specifically through four pillars of energy optimisation: 1. optimal capacity in the system for additional renewable energy, which is intermittent by nature; 2. a strong improvement in energy efficiency, supporting savings; 3. the integration of electric mobility, reducing fossil fuels and possibly adding a buffer to the grid; 4. enhanced stability for the energy network and greater energy security. This report presents an overview of the e-harbours project journey, including a presentation of the main findings and recommendations.

The European Union is pushing to achieve a sustainable, competitive and secure energy supply in Europe. This has translated into significant long-term renewable energy targets towards 2050, and the ambition to improve the European grid. A large share of this development is expected to occur in the North Sea. This paper investigates which transmission architecture is the most beneficial to integrate large shares of renewable energy in the North Sea region, and the consequences of the planning horizon when planning such a system towards 2050 are analysed. This is achieved by performing investment optimisation of generation and transmission for different scenarios. It is found that: 1) an integrated offshore grid configuration planned over a long planning horizon leads to cost minimization; 2) the grid topology is not likely to influence the penetration of variable renewable energy, but it will affect the contribution of each variable renewable energy type and the system costs; and 3) not taking the future into account when developing the energy system is likely to lead to a more expensive system. These results remark the importance of long-term planning horizon for energy systems and grid expansion and calls for a political focus on planning and international cooperation.