n order to meet the European climate targets, namely reduce greenhouse gas emissions at least 80 percent by 2050, the share of renewables in the energy supply must increase substantially. In the cooperative project RES- DEGREE, researchers from the Fraunhofer ISE and from the E3MLab at the National Technical University of Athens investigated how European climate targets can be met. Above all, they analyzed how this endeavor affects the share of renewable energy on the European electricity market and the cross-border electricity transfer between countries. The project results have been published in a final report.
Using the countries Germany and Greece as a first case study, the RES-DEGREE project analyzes how the coupling of national and regional electricity grids can be exploited and maximized for cost-effectiveness. In the models, local factors such as radiation conditions or national costs were just as important for the analysis as determining the electricity transmission pathways between the two countries. The project team at Fraunhofer ISE developed a method for integrating high-resolution renewable energy potentials into an energy system model of the European electricity sector. Without loss of quality, very detailed data on production, potential and power plants were input into ENTIGRIS, a model developed at Fraunhofer ISE to optimize the expansion of the German and European electricity market. The ENTIGRIS platform determines the optimal distribution of renewable and conventional power plants combined with the necessary grid infrastructure.
