Planning low carbon electricity systems for Great Britain in 2050

About the seminar:

Decarbonising our electricity supply is essential to meet the UK’s climate change targets, particularly so in light of the ongoing drive to electrify transport and heat. In this context renewables like solar and wind are likely to feature prominently because of their tumbling costs in recent decades. Designing power systems with high shares of renewables requires models that capture their spatiotemporal variability and how they interaction with the rest of the system, e.g. the transmission network, electricity storage, etc. This in turn means developing a class of hybrid energy models that have high spatial and temporal resolution and simultaneously make planning and operational decisions. Here we introduce the high spatial and temporal resolution electricity system model highRES which we have developed and outline two applications of the model in a UK context: i) how the variability of weather from one year to the next impacts power systems with high shares of renewables, ii) taking an energy-land-water, or nexus, perspective to designing low carbon power systems for Great Britain in 2050.

About the speakers:

Dr Marianne Zeyringer is a Senior Research Associate at the UCL Energy Institute where she co-developed the highRES model. Her research focuses on the integration of variable renewables. She has a joint PhD in “Temporal and Spatial Explicit Modelling of Renewable Energy Systems” from Utrecht University and BOKU University, Vienna. Previously she worked on modelling renewables for climate change mitigation and electricity access at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

Dr James Price joined the UCL Energy Institute as a Research Associate in October 2014. Before that he worked at the Met Office Hadley Centre and in environmental consultancy following the completion of a PhD in Physics at the University of Bristol. James’ research focus is modelling the integration of high shares of variable renewables (VRE), principally wind and solar, into the UK power system. For this purpose he co-develops the high spatial and temporal resolution renewable electricity system model (highRES).