Updated policy pathways for the energy transition in Europe and selected European countries is an update on the February 2019 report from MUSTEC.
A key challenge for the European energy transition will be to find ways to handle large shares of fluctuating supply while making the system flexible enough to remain stable, and preferably at a reasonable cost. Increasing flexibility could also mean the large-scale expansion of storage, both decentralised (e.g. batteries) and centralised (e.g. pressurised air storage). Finally, a key measure to increase the level of flexibility in the power system is a targeted expansion of dispatchable renewables, including concentrating solar power (CSP) with thermal storage.
Moreover, the national power systems in Europe are becoming increasingly integrated, driven both by the development of an internal European power market and by techno-economic efficiencies of sharing capacities across national borders. As increased transmission over large distances is a potential key balancing measure for fluctuating renewables, their expansion is an emerging driver for system interconnection.
This means that both electricity policy and the technical electricity system are increasingly europeanised: national decisions are not the only determinant, and sometimes not even the primary one, of a country’s electricity future.
This MUSTEC report investigates the potential future need for and role of dispatchable renewable power sources available in Europe – in particular CSP equipped with thermal storage. The data generated is used in a modelling framework in the MUSTEC project consortium, describing the policy pathways of a set of European countries. These policy pathways consist of near- to mid-term policy decisions that affect the need for power system flexibility.
The report analyses current and potential future policy decisions in the large western EU countries (Germany, France, Spain, Italy), Switzerland, and the European Union, bundling them into sets of policy pathways which describe possible trajectories of each country and the EU as a whole.