TY  - GEN
A1  - Tröndle, Tim
A1  - Lilliestam, Johan
A1  - Marelli, Stefano
A1  - Pfenninger, Stefan
T1  - Trade-offs between geographic scale, cost, and infrastructure requirements for fully renewable electricity in Europe
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - The European potential for renewable electricity is sufficient to enable fully renewable supply on different scales, from self-sufficient, subnational regions to an interconnected continent. We not only show that a continental-scale system is the cheapest, but also that systems on the national scale and below are possible at cost penalties of 20% or less. Transmission is key to low cost, but it is not necessary to vastly expand the transmission system. When electricity is transmitted only to balance fluctuations, the transmission grid size is comparable to today's, albeit with expanded cross-border capacities. The largest differences across scales concern land use and thus social acceptance: in the continental system, generation capacity is concentrated on the European periphery, where the best resources are. Regional systems, in contrast, have more dispersed generation. The key trade-off is therefore not between geographic scale and cost, but between scale and the spatial distribution of required generation and transmission infrastructure.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe - 146 
KW  - levelized cost
KW  - energy-system
KW  - power-system
KW  - storage
KW  - wind
KW  - reanalysis
KW  - decarbonization
KW  - transmission
KW  - integration
KW  - deployment
Y1  - 2022
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-539611
IS  - 9
SP  - 1929
EP  - 1948
ER  -