arXiv subjects

Detlef Stolten

Publications and source records attributed to Detlef Stolten.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Stable and Renewable: Assessing the Reliability of a Fully Renewable European Energy System

The transformation of the energy system has raised concerns about the reliability of fully renewable energy systems. We address this question for a 2050 European energy system using an economically optimal adequacy assessment. Our results show that a cost-optimal, fully renewable European system can be as reliable as a fossil-based one, with an average loss of load of only 0.03% due to variability in renewable generation. Outages primarily affect industrial and service sectors, while household supply remains largely uninterrupted. Regional differences in supply security emerge, with outages concentrated in countries with a low Value of Lost Load (VoLL). We demonstrate that system reliability can be fully ensured at negligible additional cost (+0.17%) by modestly increasing hydrogen turbine (+10%) and battery capacities (+15%) beyond the cost-optimal levels. We conclude that well-designed renewable energy systems are stable, with hydrogen-based backup being a key enabler of reliability.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Which Top Energy-Intensive Manufacturing Countries Can Compete in a Renewable Energy Future?

In a world increasingly powered by renewables and aiming for greenhouse gas-neutral industrial production, the future competitiveness of todays top manufacturing countries is questioned. This study applies detailed energy system modeling to quantify the Renewable Pull, an incentive for industry relocation exerted by countries with favorable renewable conditions. Results reveal that the Renewable Pull is not a cross-industrial phenomenon but strongly depends on the relationship between energy costs and transport costs. The intensity of the Renewable Pull varies, with China, India, and Japan facing a significantly stronger effect than Germany and the United States. Incorporating national capital cost assumptions proves critical, reducing Germanys Renewable Pull by a factor of six and positioning it as the second least affected top manufacturing country after Saudi Arabia. Using Germany as a case study, the analysis moreover illustrates that targeted import strategies, especially within the EU, can nearly eliminate the Renewable Pull, offering policymakers clear options for risk mitigation.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Towards Hydrogen Autarky? Evaluating Import Costs and Domestic Competitiveness in European Energy Strategies

The design of the future European energy system depends heavily on how Europe balances its domestic hydrogen production against its reliance on imports. This study reveals that neither-extreme full self-sufficiency nor complete reliance on imports-is economically optimal through 2050. Using a high-resolution energy system model accounting for interannual weather variability, we find import cost thresholds favoring domestic production decrease from 3.0 EUR/kg (2030) to 2.5 EUR/kg (2050). However, the impact of weather is significant and can shift the optimal import share by up to 60 percentage points at constant prices. Strategies with a high import share minimize the need for domestic renewable energy and electrolyzers but require significant investment in long-distance transportation, backup electricity capacity, and storage. Conversely, achieving full self-sufficiency demands massive domestic infrastructure, including up to 1,315 GW of electrolysis by 2050. These findings highlight the critical need for diversified hydrogen strategies that balance cost, resilience, and energy sovereignty. Policy must prioritize flexible infrastructure accommodating both imports and scalable domestic production to navigate evolving market and climatic conditions.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Critical Iridium Demands arising from future Expansion of Proton Exchange Membrane Electrolysis

Proton exchange membrane electrolysis (PEMEL) is a key technology for producing green hydrogen, but its scalability is limited by the use of scarce materials, particularly iridium. Iridium oxide, the preferred anode catalyst in PEMEL, offers exceptional stability but is produced only as a by-product of platinum mining, with annual output around 7.5 tons. This study estimates future iridium demand for PEMEL under various deployment scenarios and technological advances. Results show that meeting net zero targets will require both significant improvements in catalyst efficiency and access to roughly 30\% of global iridium production annually. Supply shortages could arise as early as 2030, earlier than previously anticipated. The analysis also reveals that long-term iridium needs beyond 2040 are significantly underestimated. These findings underscore the urgent need for innovation in material efficiency and recycling, and the importance of integrating resource constraints into energy policy and technology planning to ensure a sustainable hydrogen transition.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

Large-Scale Linear Energy System Optimization: A Systematic Review on Parallelization Strategies via Decomposition

As renewable energy integration, sector coupling, and spatiotemporal detail increase, energy system optimization models grow in size and complexity, often pushing solvers to their performance limits. This systematic review explores parallelization strategies that can address these challenges. We first propose a classification scheme for linear energy system optimization models, covering their analytical focus, mathematical structure, and scope. We then review parallel decomposition methods, finding that while many offer performance benefits, no single approach is universally superior. The lack of standardized benchmark suites further complicates comparison. To address this, we recommend essential criteria for future benchmarks and minimum reporting standards. We also survey available software tools for parallel decomposition, including modular frameworks and algorithmic abstractions. Though centered on energy system models, our insights extend to the broader operations research field.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Spatially Disaggregated Energy Consumption and Emissions in End-use Sectors for Germany and Spain

High-resolution energy consumption and emissions datasets are essential for localized policy-making, resource optimization, and climate action planning. They enable municipalities to monitor mitigation strategies and foster engagement among governments, businesses, and communities. However, smaller municipalities often face data limitations that hinder tailored climate strategies. This study generates detailed final energy consumption and emissions data at the local administrative level for Germany and Spain. Using national datasets, we apply spatial disaggregation techniques with open data sources. A key innovation is the application of XGBoost for imputing missing data, combined with a stepwise spatial disaggregation process incorporating district- and province-level statistics. Prioritizing reproducibility, our open-data approach provides a scalable framework for municipalities to develop actionable climate plans. To ensure transparency, we assess the reliability of imputed values and assign confidence ratings to the disaggregated data.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

Energy Storage Autonomy in Renewable Energy Systems Through Hydrogen Salt Caverns

The expansion of renewable energy sources leads to volatility in electricity generation within energy systems. Subsurface storage of hydrogen in salt caverns can play an important role in long-term energy storage, but their global potential is not fully understood. This study investigates the global status quo and how much hydrogen salt caverns can contribute to stabilizing future renewable energy systems. A global geological suitability and land eligibility analysis for salt cavern placement is conducted and compared with the derived long-term storage needs of renewable energy systems. Results show that hydrogen salt caverns can balance between 43% and 66% of the global electricity demand and exist in North America, Europe, China, and Australia. By sharing the salt cavern potential with neighboring countries, up to 85% of the global electricity demand can be stabilized by salt caverns. Therefore, global hydrogen can play a significant role in stabilizing renewable energy systems.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

The Striking Impact of Natural Hazard Risk on Global Green Hydrogen Cost

Due to climate change, natural hazards that affect energy infrastructure will become more frequent in the future. However, to incorporate natural hazard risk into infrastructure investment decisions, we develop an approach to translate this risk into discount rates. Thus, our newly developed discount rate approach incorporates both economic risk and natural hazard risk. To illustrate the impact of including the risk of natural hazards, we apply country-specific discount rates for hydrogen production costs. The country-specific relative difference in hydrogen generation cost ranges from a 96% surplus in the Philippines to a -63% cost reduction in Kyrgyzstan compared to a discount rate that only consists of economic risks. The inclusion of natural hazard risk changes the cost ranking of technologies as outcome of energy system models and thus policy recommendations. The derived discount rates for 254 countries worldwide are published in this publication for further use.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2025

Wiki-Quantities and Wiki-Measurements: Datasets of Quantities and their Measurement Context from Wikipedia

To cope with the large number of publications, more and more researchers are automatically extracting data of interest using natural language processing methods based on supervised learning. Much data, especially in the natural and engineering sciences, is quantitative, but there is a lack of datasets for identifying quantities and their context in text. To address this issue, we present two large datasets based on Wikipedia and Wikidata: Wiki-Quantities is a dataset consisting of over 1.2 million annotated quantities in the English-language Wikipedia. Wiki-Measurements is a dataset of 38,738 annotated quantities in the English-language Wikipedia along with their respective measured entity, property, and optional qualifiers. Manual validation of 100 samples each of Wiki-Quantities and Wiki-Measurements found 100% and 84-94% correct, respectively. The datasets can be used in pipeline approaches to measurement extraction, where quantities are first identified and then their measurement context. To allow reproduction of this work using newer or different versions of Wikipedia and Wikidata, we publish the code used to create the datasets along with the data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Towards high resolution, validated and open global wind power assessments

Wind power is expected to play a crucial role in future net-zero energy systems, but wind power simulations to support deployment strategies vary drastically in their results, hindering reliable design decisions. Therefore, we present a transparent, open source, validated and evaluated, global wind power simulation tool ETHOS.RESKit.Wind with high spatial resolution and customizable designs for both onshore and offshore wind turbines. The tool provides a comprehensive validation and calibration procedure using over 16 million global measurements from metrerological masts and wind turbine sites. We achieve a global average capacity factor mean error of 0.006 and Pearson correlation of 0.865. In addition, we evaluate its performance against several aggregated and statistical sources of wind power generation. The release of ETHOS.RESKit.Wind is a step towards a fully open source and open data approach to accurate wind power modeling by incorporating the most comprehensive simulation advances in one model.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Countries across the world use more land for golf courses than wind or solar energy

Land use is a critical factor in the siting of renewable energy facilities and is often scrutinized due to perceived conflicts with other land demands. Meanwhile, substantial areas are devoted to activities such as golf, which are accessible to only a select few and have a significant land and environmental footprint. Our study shows that in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, far more land is allocated to golf courses than to renewable energy facilities. Areas equivalent to those currently used for golf could support the installation of up to 842 GW of solar and 659 GW of wind capacity in the top ten countries with the most golf courses. In many of these countries, this potential exceeds both current installed capacity and medium-term projections. These findings underscore the untapped potential of rethinking land use priorities to accelerate the transition to renewable energy.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2024

High-Resolution Rooftop-PV Potential Assessment for a Resilient Energy System in Ukraine

Rooftop photovoltaic (RTPV) systems are essential for building a decarbonized and, due to its decentralized structure, more resilient energy system, and are particularly important for Ukraine, where recent conflicts have damaged more than half of its electricity and heat supply capacity. Favorable solar irradiation conditions make Ukraine a strong candidate for large-scale PV deployment, but effective policy requires detailed data on spatial and temporal generation potential. This study fills the data gap by using open-source satellite building footprint data corrected with high-resolution data from eastern Germany. This approach allowed accurate estimates of rooftop area and PV capacity and generation across Ukraine, with simulations revealing a capacity potential of 238.8 GW and a generation potential of 290 TWh/a excluding north-facing. The majority of this potential is located in oblasts (provinces) across the country with large cities such as Donetsk, Dnipro or Kyiv and surroundings. These results, validated against previous studies and available as open data, confirm Ukraine's significant potential for RTPV, supporting both energy resilience and climate goals.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Automated and Connected Driving: State-of-the-Art and Implications for Future Scenario Analysis

Automated driving can have a huge impact on the transport system in passenger, as well as freight applications; however, market and technological development are difficult to foresee. Therefore, a systems analysis is called for to answer the question: What is the impact of automated driving on the techno-economic performance of transport systems? It is important to quantify the potential impacts not only on a local scale and for specific use cases but for entire transport systems at large. Here, we provide an overview of the current state of automated driving, including academic research in addition to industrial development. For industrial development, we find that it will take at least until 2030-2040 for automated vehicles to be widely available for passenger transport. For freight transport on the other hand, automated vehicles might already be used within the next years at least on motorways. For academic research, we find that most studies on passenger transport consider shared automated vehicles separated from other transport modes and consider specific regions only. For freight transport we find that operational strategies and usage potentials for level 4 and 5 trucks lack alignment with real-life use cases and driving profiles. Based on this, we develop an analytical framework for future research. This includes a mode choice model for passenger transport demand calculations, a total cost of ownership model for freight trucks, transport statistics for freight flows, a microscopic traffic simulation to assess the impact of automated vehicles on traffic flow, and a road network analysis.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Mapping Local Green Hydrogen Cost-Potentials by a Multidisciplinary Approach

For fast-tracking climate change response, green hydrogen is key for achieving greenhouse gas neutral energy systems. Especially Sub-Saharan Africa can benefit from it enabling an increased access to clean energy through utilizing its beneficial conditions for renewable energies. However, developing green hydrogen strategies for Sub-Saharan Africa requires highly detailed and consistent information ranging from technical, environmental, economic, and social dimensions, which is currently lacking in literature. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive novel approach embedding the required range of disciplines to analyze green hydrogen cost-potentials in Sub-Saharan Africa. This approach stretches from a dedicated land eligibility based on local preferences, a location specific renewable energy simulation, locally derived sustainable groundwater limitations under climate change, an optimization of local hydrogen energy systems, and a socio-economic indicator-based impact analysis. The capability of the approach is shown for case study regions in Sub-Saharan Africa highlighting the need for a unified, interdisciplinary approach.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2024

Global Shipyard Capacities Limiting the Ramp-Up of Global Hydrogen Transport

Decarbonizing the global energy system requires significant expansions of renewable energy technologies. Given that cost-effective renewable sources are not necessarily situated in proximity to the largest energy demand centers globally, the maritime transportation of low-carbon energy carriers, such as renewable-based hydrogen or ammonia, will be needed. However, whether existent shipyards possess the required capacity to provide the necessary global fleet has not yet been answered. Therefore, this study estimates global tanker demand based on projections for global hydrogen demand, while comparing these projections with historic shipyard production. Our findings reveal a potential bottleneck until 2033-2039 if relying on liquefied hydrogen exclusively. This bottleneck could be circumvented by increasing local hydrogen production, utilizing pipelines, or liquefied ammonia as an energy carrier for hydrogen. Furthermore, the regional concentration of shipyard locations raises concerns about diversification. Increasing demand for container vessels could substantially hinder the scale-up of maritime hydrogen transport.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2023

ETHOS.FINE: A Framework for Integrated Energy System Assessment

The decarbonization of energy systems worldwide requires a transformation of their design and operation across all sectors, that is, the residential and commercial, industrial, and transportation sectors. Energy system models are frequently employed for assessing these changes, providing scenarios on potential future system design and on how new technologies and a modified infrastructure will meet future energy demands. Thus, they support investment decisions and policy-making. The Python-based Framework for Integrated Energy System Assessment (ETHOS.FINE) is a software package that provides a toolbox for modeling, analyting and evaluating such energy systems using mathematical optimization. ETHOS.FINE is part of the Energy Transformation paTHway Optimization Suite (ETHOS) , a collection of modeling tools developed by the Institute of Energy and Climate Research - Techno-Economic System Analysis (IEK-3) at Forschungszentrum Jülich. ETHOS offers a holistic view on energy systems at arbitrary scales providing tools for geospatial renewable potential analyses, time series simulation tools for residential and industrial sector, discrete choice models for the transportation sector, modeling of global energy supply routes, and local infrastructure assessments, among others. The ETHOS model suite is, e.g., used for analyzing the energy transition of Germany (Stolten et al., 2022).

math.OC↗

arXiv2023

A Metadata-Based Ecosystem to Improve the FAIRness of Research Software

The reuse of research software is central to research efficiency and academic exchange. The application of software enables researchers with varied backgrounds to reproduce, validate, and expand upon study findings. Furthermore, the analysis of open source code aids in the comprehension, comparison, and integration of approaches. Often, however, no further use occurs because relevant software cannot be found or is incompatible with existing research processes. This results in repetitive software development, which impedes the advancement of individual researchers and entire research communities. In this article, the DataDesc ecosystem is presented, an approach to describing data models of software interfaces with detailed and machine-actionable metadata. In addition to a specialized metadata schema, an exchange format and support tools for easy collection and the automated publishing of software documentation are introduced. This approach practically increases the FAIRness, i.e., findability, accessibility, interoperability, and so the reusability of research software, as well as effectively promotes its impact on research.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Opportunities for Large Language Models and Discourse in Engineering Design

In recent years, large language models have achieved breakthroughs on a wide range of benchmarks in natural language processing and continue to increase in performance. Recently, the advances of large language models have raised interest outside the natural language processing community and could have a large impact on daily life. In this paper, we pose the question: How will large language models and other foundation models shape the future product development process? We provide the reader with an overview of the subject by summarizing both recent advances in natural language processing and the use of information technology in the engineering design process. We argue that discourse should be regarded as the core of engineering design processes, and therefore should be represented in a digital artifact. On this basis, we describe how foundation models such as large language models could contribute to the design discourse by automating parts thereof that involve creativity and reasoning, and were previously reserved for humans. We describe how simulations, experiments, topology optimizations, and other process steps can be integrated into a machine-actionable, discourse-centric design process. Finally, we outline the future research that will be necessary for the implementation of the conceptualized framework.

cs.CL↗