Code for the paper "The Potential Role of a Hydrogen Network in Europe"

This repository contains the code and manuscript accompanying the paper "The Potential Role of a Hydrogen Network in Europe".

Abstract

Electricity transmission expansion has suffered many delays in Europe in recent decades, despite its significance for integrating renewable electricity. A hydrogen network reusing the existing gas network could not only help to supply demand for low-emission fuels, but could also balance variations in wind and solar energy across the continent and thus avoid power grid expansion. We pursue this idea by varying the allowed expansion of electricity and hydrogen grids in net-zero CO2 scenarios for a sector-coupled European energy system. With 181 regions and 3-hourly time series, we capture transmission bottlenecks, the variability of demand and renewable supply, and potentials for retrofitting gas pipelines and developing geological hydrogen storage. We find that a hydrogen network connecting regions with low-cost and abundant renewable potentials to demand centers, electrofuel production and cavern storage sites reduces system costs by up to 26 bn€/a (3.4%). Between 64% and 69% of this network could reuse natural gas pipelines. While the expansion of both networks together can achieve the largest cost savings of 9.9%, the expansion of neither appears as essential in a net-zero system as long as higher costs can be accepted and flexibility options are enabled to manage grid bottlenecks.

Repository Structure

• configs contains configuration files for PyPSA-Eur and PyPSA-Eur-Sec for different scenarios.
• notebooks contains the Jupyter notebooks used for the evaluation of results.
• paper contains the .tex files for the paper.
• workflows contains the PyPSA-Eur, PyPSA-Eur, and technology-data workflows.

Installation and Usage

Clone the repository including its submodules:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:fneum/spatial-sector

Install the necessary dependencies using conda or mamba:

mamba env create -f workflows/pypsa-eur/envs/environment.yaml

Navigate into the main Snakemake workflow directory of PyPSA-Eur-Sec:

cd workflows/pypsa-eur-sec

To run the scenarios of a particular configuration file (e.g. configs/config.main.yaml), run:

snakemake -call --configfile ../../configs/config.main.yaml plot_summary

This call requires a high-performance computing environment.

Please follow the documentation of PyPSA-Eur for more details.

License

MIT