A new paper entitled “Integrating an enhanced diversification metric into energy system models to assess the security and resilience of renewable-based energy systems towards carbon neutrality” has been published in Elsevier’s Energy Journal.
As countries transition away from fossil fuels and integrate increasing shares of variable renewable energy sources, ensuring energy security and resilience is becoming an increasingly important part of energy planning. Global supply chain disruptions, energy crises and geopolitical conflicts have further highlighted the need to consider these dimensions alongside emissions reduction and cost optimisation.
The study reviews existing energy security and resilience indicators and proposes a decentralisation-adjusted diversity index to assess how energy system diversity evolves throughout the energy transition.
The proposed approach can be applied across different energy system modelling frameworks and is demonstrated through two national case studies: Denmark and Greece. Using EnergyPLAN and OSeMOSYS, the researchers examine the transition from fossil fuel-based energy systems towards 100% renewable energy systems.
The findings show that while phasing out fossil fuels reduces diversity in conventional energy sources, this can be offset by deploying geographically dispersed renewable energy sources. As a result, accounting for decentralisation reveals the potential for renewable-based energy systems to achieve greater diversity, strengthening energy security and resilience.
The key takeaway: Energy diversity is not only about the range of energy sources in a system, but also about their geographical distribution. Accounting for decentralisation can therefore provide valuable insights for energy system modelling, strategic planning and policy development.
Read the full open-access paper here.
