Source: EU Science Hub Joint Research Centre
Energy system models allow simulating scenarios for decarbonisation pathways. These scenarios provide important insights for policymakers on the pathways to achieve the 2°C and 1.5°C temperature targets put forward in the UNFCCC Paris Agreement. The power sector plays a crucial role in any decarbonisation strategy. Renewable power generation technologies are fundamentally changing the structure of the power sector. A major challenge for the power system is the integration of large capacities of intermittent wind and solar power generation. On the demand side, the electricity load varies substantially throughout the day (e.g. morning and evening peak) and across power consuming sectors (e.g. residential, industry, services, etc.). Moreover, seasonal changes (e.g. heating and cooling demand) affect the variation of electricity load throughout the year. Additionally, fundamental changes will occur such as the spread of electric vehicles, battery storage but also demand side management (DSM) strategies.
In power sector models, these dynamic interactions have to be implemented. A crucial condition for modelling the power sector adequately is the availability of temporal data reflecting the dynamics of the power system. Making available temporal data for the power sector with a high time-resolution is the objective of this technical report. This work provides temporal data with hourly resolution for electricity load and power generation from wind and solar.
This report also studies how representative daily profiles are affected by the tremendous expansion of wind and solar capacities projected in decarbonisation scenarios. To this end, wind and solar shares according to the 2°C scenario of Global Energy and Climate Outlook 2018 [3,4] are used for calculating representative daily profiles for scenarios years 2010 to 2100. For energy system modellers the provided representative daily profiles allow to analyse the impact of an expansion of wind and solar on the power system with a view to draw important conclusions for policy makers.
