Global Energy Pathways
About
The transformation to Greenhouse Gas-Neutral energy system requires the intensive use of renewable resources worldwide, which include renewable energies and their derived products. The integration and linking of these resources into global supply paths leads to challenges for the security of supply. In order to overcome these challenges, it is particularly important to answer the question of what potential of renewable resources reliably exists where and when, and how can supply and demand be linked in a global energy system in the best possible way.
Research Topics
Against this background, the Research Group Global Energy Supply Pathways is particularly concerned with the global expansion and exchange of renewable energies and their downstream products, such as green hydrogen. For this purpose, newly developed and existing techno-economic, spatially and temporally high-resolution energy system models from the ETHOS model suite are developed and used. Among other things, the modeling tools enable a comparison of different process chains and their combinations and include import options for Germany and Europe. The analyses focus on energy and material supply security under socio-technical framework conditions and thus aim to identify robust supply paths as decision support for politics and business.
Members
research fields
Potential of Renewabke Energy Resources
Our potential analyses of renewable resources are primarily carried out using two models, GLAES and RESkit, from the ETHOS model suite. GLAES is used to analyze the available land areas on the basis of dozens of socio-technical criteria and to place renewable energy plants in specific locations. For each of these locations worldwide, RESkit uses the latest weather data to calculate the best design of the energy plants and the time series of electricity feed-in. This is done across different weather years in order to be able to consider the influence of weather years on the security of supply in an integrated manner. These temporally and spatially high-resolution potentials of renewable resources are suitably aggregated for use in other system models, such as ETHOS.NESTOR or ETHIOS.Infrastructure, using methods from the Reserach Group Methodology Lab among others. In addition, these potentials are also being incorporated into the creation of a green hydrogen atlas for West Africa and southern Africa in the H2-Atlas-Africa project (https://www.h2atlas.de/de/) .
Global Supply Chains
The potential of renewable resources is distributed worldwide. This means that they are not always close to demand in terms of region and time. The conditions for the expansion of renewable resources also vary greatly around the world. This is why we think about and analyze supply paths globally. This also includes analyses of global supply paths for green hydrogen, which are used both as cost-potential curves for the import of green hydrogen to Germany in the Integrated Transformation Strategies group and in projects such as KSG45 or ETSAP-DE. The special feature here is the level of technical detail and the high spatial and temporal resolution without which no reliable results can be achieved. We can only calculate this high level of detail and the associated complexity with the help of our institute's own tailor made computing and storage cluster.
Last Modified: 12.11.2024