In mid-April 2023, the final three nuclear power plants in Germany will be taken offline permanently. At the same time, the energy crisis resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine has fueled calls for the construction of new nuclear reactors in Germany. A similar debate is taking place in many other countries in the context of the climate crisis. Since the 1950s, nuclear power has been one of ...
The use of green hydrogen can support the decarbonization of sectors which are difficult to electrify, such as industry or heavy transport. Yet, the wider power sector effects of providing green hydrogen are not well understood so far. We use an open-source electricity sector model to investigate potential power sector interactions of three alternative supply chains for green hydrogen in Germany in ...
To decarbonize the economy, many governments have set targets for the use of renewable energy sources. These are often formulated as relative shares of electricity demand or supply. Implementing respective constraints in energy models is a surprisingly delicate issue. They may cause a modeling artifact of excessive electricity storage use. We introduce this phenomenon as “unintended storage cycling”, ...
The Russian war on Ukraine and Germany’s dependence on Russian gas require a rethink of German energy supplies. While there is a heated debate about an immediate energy embargo, Russia could also stop its supplies at any time. To date, Germany has purchased around 55 percent of its natural gas from Russia. DIW Berlin has developed scenarios for how the German energy system could become independent ...
The supply security of fossil gas has been disrupted by the Russo-Ukrainian War. Decisions to relocate the production and transport of gas have become so urgent that new long-term contracts are imminent that undermine the Paris Climate Agreement. Here, we simulate how quickly the addition of renewable electricity and the installation of heat pumps can substitute enough gas to reduce supply risk, while ...
Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are a central tool for the quantitative analysis of climate change mitigation strategies. However, due to their global, cross-sectoral and centennial scope, IAMs cannot explicitly represent the temporal and spatial details required to properly analyze the key role of variable renewable electricity (VRE) for decarbonizing the power sector and enabling emission reductions ...
The European Union has increased pressure on Russia by enacting a coal embargo. Following a transition period, Russian coal imports will end in August 2022. Recent studies show that Germany will be able to substitute Russian supplies with imports from other countries by summer 2022. However, with the looming threat of a Russian gas supply stop, plans must be developed to ensure security of supply. ...