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The European Council has agreed ambitious EU climate and energy targets for 2030, including a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 levels and a minimum share of 27% renewable energy consumption. This paper investigates the challenges faced by the European power systems as the EU transitions towards a low carbon energy system with increased amounts of variable renewable electricity generation. The research here adds value to, and complements the power systems results of the PRIMES energy systems model that is used to inform EU energy and climate policy. The methodology uses a soft-linking approach that scrutinizes the power system in high temporal and technical detail for a target year. This enables generation of additional results that provide new insights not possible using a single model approach. These results point to: 1) overestimation of variable renewable generation by 2.4% 2) curtailment in excess of 11% in isolated member states 3) EU interconnector congestion average of 24% 4) reduced wholesale electricity pricing and few run hours raising concerns for the financial remuneration of conventional generation 5) maintenance of sufficient levels of system inertia in member states becomes challenging with significant penetrations of variable renewable generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU dependence on imported gas is increasing, rising to 67% in the year 2014 with 30% of total gas consumption used for electricity generation that year. With such a dependence on imported gas, gas supply interruptions can have significant impacts on the EU energy system and economy. This points to the need for integrated electricity and gas modelling tools to fully explore the potential impacts of gas supply interruptions. This paper builds and applies a detailed publically available integrated electricity and gas model for the EU-28. We use this model to examine a number of hypothetical scenarios where gas supply routes are interrupted for yearly periods and the impacts on power system operation and gas flow in Europe observed. Model results show that interruption of Russian gas supply to the EU could lead to a rise in average gas prices of 28% and 12% in electricity prices. When supply from North Africa was removed all Southern European states were affected heavily, Spain in particular saw large increases of 30% in gas prices with a corresponding rise of 18% in electricity prices as a result. In addition to supply interruptions, all gas storages were removed from the model to examine the importance of gas storage infrastructure. This resulted in an average increase in power prices of 6% across Europe. These additional insights offer an increased understanding of the interplay between the gas and power systems and identify challenges which may arise when seeking to understand energy systems as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Marginal abatement cost curves are derived to compare mitigation options. • Energy system analyses on scenario ensembles capture more technology details. • Multiple MACCs demonstrate critical impacts of CCS and bioenergy. The European Union has a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 to keep global warming within 2 °C relative to pre-industrial levels. The more recent Paris climate agreement has a more ambitious target of limiting the temperature rise to well below 2 °C and the EU ambition is growing to become climate-neutral by 2050. This research explores decarbonization options using an innovative analytical approach that combines energy systems analysis and marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs). System-wide MACCs are derived using scenario ensembles from Irish TIMES energy systems model. Decomposition analysis is then used to associate decarbonization options with carbon abatement costs. In addition, energy systems analysis is carried out on the underlying scenario ensembles that are used to generate the MACCs to capture more technological details and to reflect interactions among technologies. The results show that MACCs are highly dependent on model assumptions and the availabilities of bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies play critical roles. The paper also shows how key mitigation measures can be ranked and classified into categories of resilient (wind energy, CCS, electric vehicles, biofuels), tipping-point (electrifying building heating, biomass plants), and niche (ocean energy) technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]