Impact of climatic, technical and economic uncertainties on the optimal design of a CO2-neutral electricity, heating and cooling system in Europe

Designing large-scale energy system through techno-economical optimisation model depends on specific input parameters, in particular, climatic, technical and economic assumptions. In this paper, European electricity, heating and cooling coupled system is modelled in one-node-per-country, hourly-resolved network under technical constraints. Variable renewable energy sources (VRES), storage, synthetic gas and transmission cooperate together to achieve a CO2-neutral system. Temperature increases and heat savings, which mimic the global warming and potential retrofitting, would reduce the heating and cooling demand (HCD) significantly, thus lowering the system costs but not the levelised cost of energy (LCOE). Demand-side management through buildings' thermal inertia could shape the heat demand, yet has modest impact on the system configuration. Cost reductions of VRES manage to bring down the system costs and LCOE the most, followed by heating technologies, but both are suffering from the rebound effect. Storage cost reductions have modest impact to the cost, yet altering the wind/solar photovoltaic (PV) mix and weakening the benefits of interconnection. The results obtained by combining scenarios reveal the independence of impact between temperature increases and renewable cost reductions. A considerable robustness is observed in terms of VRES penetration, curtailment and wind/solar photovoltaic (PV) mix for most of the scenarios. By contrary, the heating and cooling sector is strongly affected, due to either more flexible HCD or cost reductions from renewable and heating technologies.