arXiv subjects

Marta Victoria

Publications and source records attributed to Marta Victoria.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Can Optimal Dispatch Models Recreate Reality? A Retrospective Analysis of Europe's 2022 Energy Crisis Using PyPSA-Eur

Electricity prices result from the complex interplay of supply and demand, which depends on variable renewable energy production, fuel costs, CO$_2$ price, and grid bottlenecks.Between 2020 and 2024, COVID-19 shifted demand and disrupted supply chains and operations in Europe, while Russia's invasion of Ukraine constrained gas supply, causing exceptional volatility in gas prices. It remains unclear whether optimal dispatch models can reliably replicate historical hourly prices during crises, given the rapid fluctuations in fuel prices and operators' limited foresight. In this work, we ask whether an optimal dispatch model, parametrised with historical data on demand, fuel, and CO$_2$ prices, can reproduce the observed market outcomes during this period. We perform hourly hindcasts of electricity generation in 35 countries from 2020 to 2024 using PyPSA-Eur and compare the nodal marginal electricity prices with historical ENTSO-E market prices using the Symmetric Mean Absolute Percentage Error (SMAPE). The scenarios compare static vs dynamic assumptions on fuel and CO$_2$ prices, as well as perfect foresight vs a two-week rolling-horizon optimization. Combining high-resolution fuel and CO$_2$ price time series with limited-foresight substantially improves hindcast accuracy, yielding an average SMAPE of 20.76% based on the daily load-weighted average price for the entire Europe. While improvements relative to the scenario with perfect foresight and static price inputs occur, they are most pronounced during periods of high fuel-price volatility, when marginal-cost swings propagate to electricity prices. In 2022, the optimal generation mix in most countries shows substantially less natural gas and more coal than historically observed. Other discrepancies can be attributed to the model's omission of real-world policy interventions, other dispatch constraints, and generator outages.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Exploring carbon dioxide removal strategies to help decarbonise Europe using high-resolution modelling

The electrification of energy demand across sectors, powered by solar and wind generation, is the best strategy for achieving carbon neutrality. Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategies are also expected to play a crucial role by providing net-negative emissions that can offset residual CO2 emissions, including those from cement manufacturing. While previous studies have assessed the role of CDRs in Europe's decarbonisation, most either focus solely on combinations of biogenic point-source capture and direct air capture (DAC) coupled with underground sequestration, or consider multiple CDR strategies at low spatial and temporal resolution, thereby limiting the representation of linkages amongst technologies. In this study, the sector-coupled European energy system model PyPSA-Eur is extended to include afforestation, perennialisation, biochar, and enhanced rock weathering (ERW) as additional CDR strategies. Using this model with a 3-hourly resolution and a network comprising 90 nodes, results show that a climate-neutral energy system equipped with these CDR strategies is 9% less expensive. Afforestation, perennialisation, and ERW potentials are fully utilised across regions, whereas biochar is not selected due to limited solid biomass feedstock being allocated to other higher-value processes. Furthermore, when these CDR strategies are combined with underground sequestration and a continental CO2 transport network, DAC is no longer required to achieve climate neutrality in Europe.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2026

Near-optimal solutions for carbon capture, conversion, storage, and removal strategies

Achieving climate neutrality in Europe requires rapid electrification alongside carbon management strategies for residual emissions. Existing analyses of the European energy system often focus on collocated carbon capture and geological sequestration, with limited attention to the interactions among carbon capture and utilization, transport, sequestration, and diverse carbon dioxide removal (CDR) options. Moreover, existing literature focuses on discussing the optimal, neglecting that near-optimal solutions might provide very different system configurations at a marginal higher cost. Here, we integrate afforestation, biochar, enhanced rock weathering, and perennialization into a sector-coupled European energy system model (PyPSA-Eur) clustered to 39 nodes with 750 aggregated time steps. We explore their contributions using a Modelling to Generate Alternatives (MGA) approach. The approach combines minimization, maximization, and random vectors to explore the near-optimal solution space for up to 5% increased total system costs. Our results show that, in a carbon-neutral system, multiple configurations of carbon management options can achieve net-zero emissions with only marginal cost increases. We find that a 5% total system cost increase is sufficient to accommodate the full spectrum from zero to full deployment of the individual CDR options, as well as a wide range of synthetic fuel use across different fuel types. Increased reliance on CDR options offers no clear cost advantage compared to greater utilization of synthetic fuels.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Evaluating Power-to-Heat-to-Power Storage Potential in Wind- and Solar-Dominated Energy Markets

This study assesses the role of Power-to-Heat-to-Power Storage (PHPS) systems, also known as Carnot batteries, in the national energy system of a wind-dominated (Denmark) and a solar-dominated (Spain) region. Using the open-source PyPSA framework, we model sector-coupled electricity and heating systems, and evaluate individual and district heating configurations for heat provision at residential level, with and without PHPS waste heat recovery. Our results show that PHPS is most viable in individual heating systems, and in wind-dominated locations, where its low cost per energy capacity enables it to balance long-duration fluctuations. Moreover, waste heat recovery is essential to enhance PHPS competitiveness, allowing it to displace lithium-ion batteries. Conversely, PHPS is largely outcompeted in district heating systems, which favour low-cost centralized energy storage. Sensitivity analysis highlights that PHPS viability depends primarily on achieving low energy capacity costs and maintaining reasonable heat-to-power conversion efficiencies. Overall, while PHPS complements existing storage technologies by providing dispatchable electricity and heat, its potential adoption is highly context-dependent, influenced by climate, heating system configuration, and competing storage costs.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2025

Resilience metrics to guide back-up investments in the power system during extreme weather

Security of supply is a common and important concern when integrating renewables in net-zero power systems. Extreme weather affects both demand and supply leading to power system stress; in Europe this stress spreads continentally beyond the meteorological root cause. We use an approach based on shadow prices to identify periods of elevated stress called system-defining events and analyse their impact on the power system. By classifying different types of system-defining events, we identify challenges to power system operation and planning. Crucially, we find the need for sufficient resilience back-up (power) capacities whose financial viability is precarious due to weather variability and weather-induced risk. Furthermore, we disentangle short- and long-term resilience challenges (from multi-day to annual scale) with distinct metrics and stress tests to incorporate both into future energy modelling assessments. Our methodology and implementation in an open energy system model (PyPSA-Eur) can be re-applied to other systems and help researchers and policymakers in building more resilient and adequate energy systems.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

Identifying demand-side measures that matter most for Europe's decarbonisation

European countries pursue a miscellany of historic, emerging, and planned initiatives to transform energy demand through behavioural shifts and end-use efficiency improvements. Yet, these efforts often evolve within fragmented national frameworks that overlook the rapidly evolving supply landscape, risking misaligned investments and diminishing public engagement. We address this need for prioritization by employing a high-resolution model of the European energy system under a net-zero constraint to co-optimise demand and supply strategies across seven sectors, mapping system response to demand mechanisms that reflect real-world practices. Our findings confirm large-scale gains from demand reductions in heating and industry, and show carbon capture reliance is most sensitive to demand reduction in aviation and shipping sectors. For heating, reducing demand peak hours yields the greatest system-level benefit, while critical demand curtailment emerges as the most effective strategy for the power sector, and is also substantially helpful in alleviating high electricity prices for consumers. Smaller, and arguably more attainable, flexibility measures also prove consequential: shifting demand to coincide with solar output delivers noticeable system-wide advantages, even when the shift spans as little as two hours.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Shifting burdens: How delayed decarbonisation of road transport affects other sectoral emission reductions

In 2022, fuel combustion in road transport accounted for approximately 21% (760 million tonnes) of CO2 emissions in the European Union (EU). Road transport is the only sector with rising emissions, with an increase of 24% compared to 1990. The EU initially aimed to ban new CO2-emitting cars by 2030 but has since delayed this target to 2035, underscoring the ongoing challenges in the push for rapid decarbonisation. The pace of decarbonisation in this sector will either ease or intensify the pressure on other sectors to stay within the EU's carbon budget. This paper explores the effects of speeding up or slowing down the transition in road transport. We reveal that a slower decarbonisation path not only drives up system costs by 126 billion Euro/a (6%) but also demands more than a doubling of the CO2 price from 137 to 290 Euro/tCO2 in 2030 to trigger decarbonisation in other sectors. On the flip side, accelerating the shift to cleaner transport proves to be the most cost-effective strategy, giving room for more gradual changes in the heating and industrial sectors, while reducing the reliance on carbon removal in later years. Earlier mandates than currently envisaged by the EU can avoid stranded assets and save up to 43 billion Euro/a compared to current policies.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Endogenous transformation of land transport in Europe for different climate targets

Road transport is responsible for about a quarter of Europe's greenhouse gas emissions, making its transformation a crucial part of Europe's overall decarbonization goals. Current European policies promote decarbonizing the transport sector and passenger car sales show an increased adoption of electric vehicles. Full electrification of land transport will significantly increase the average electricity demand but the use of smart charging and vehicle-to-grid could provide additional flexibility to balance wind and solar generation. In this study, we find cost-optimal transition pathways of the European land transport sector embedded in the sector-coupled open energy model PyPSA-Eur. We consider fossil-fueled, hydrogen-fueled, and electric cars using a 3-hour time resolution for a full year and covering 33 interconnected European countries. We analyze a transition path from 2025 to 2050 under different carbon budgets corresponding to a 1.7{\deg}C and 2{\deg}C temperature increase. Our results show that rapid electrification of road transport reduces the total system cost, even in the absence of climate targets. We see a clear preference for rapidly decommissioning internal combustion engine vehicles and using electric vehicles in all countries and under all carbon budgets. Allowing smart charging of electric vehicles decreases the total system cost by 1.6% because it reduces the need to install stationary batteries by almost 40%.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

PyPSA-Spain: an extension of PyPSA-Eur to model the Spanish energy system

This work presents PyPSA-Spain, an open-source model of the Spanish energy system based on the European model PyPSA-Eur. It aims to leverage the benefits of single-country modelling over a multi-country approach. In particular, several databases provided by Spanish institutions are exploited to improve the estimation of solar photovoltaic (PV) and onshore wind generation hourly profiles, as well as the spatio-temporal description of the electricity demand. PyPSA-Spain attains hourly resolution for a entire year and represents the Spanish energy system using a configurable number of nodes, while selecting around 35-50 nodes is identified as a good compromise between spatial resolution and model simplicity. To accommodate cross-border interactions, a nested model approach with PyPSA-Eur was used, wherein time-dependent electricity prices from neighbouring countries were precomputed through the optimisation of the European energy system. As a case study, the optimal electricity mix for 2030 was obtained and compared with the latest update of the Spanish National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP) from September 2024.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2024

Lessons learned from establishing a rooftop photovoltaic system crowdsourced by students and employees at Aarhus University

Energy communities are promoted in the European legislation as a strategy to enable citizen participation in the energy transition. Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, due to their distributed nature, present an opportunity to create such communities. At Aarhus University (Denmark), we have established an energy community consisting of a 98-kW rooftop solar PV installation, crowdsourced by students and employees of the university. The participants can buy one or several shares of the installation (which is divided into 900 shares), the electricity is consumed by the university, and the shareowners receive some economic compensation every year. The road to establishing this energy community has been rough, and we have gathered many lessons. In this manuscript, we present the 10 largest challenges which might arise when setting up a university energy community and our particular approach to facing them. Sharing these learnings might pave the way for those willing to establish their own energy community. We also include policy recommendations at the European, national, and municipal levels to facilitate the deployment of energy communities

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Strategic deployment of solar photovoltaics for achieving self-sufficiency in Europe throughout the energy transition

Transition pathways for Europe to achieve carbon neutrality emphasize the need for a massive deployment of solar and wind energy. Global cost optimization would lead to installing most of the renewable capacity in a few resource-rich countries, but policy decisions could prioritize other factors. In this study, we focus on the effect of energy independence on Europe's energy system design. We show that self-sufficiency constraints lead to a more equitable distribution of costs and installed capacities across Europe. However, countries that typically depend on energy imports face cost increases of up to 150% to achieve complete self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency particularly favours solar photovoltaic (PV) energy, and with declining PV module prices, alternative configurations like inverter dimensioning and horizontal tracking are beneficial enough to be part of the optimal solution for many countries. Moreover, we found that very large solar and wind annual installation rates are required, but they seem feasible in light of recent historical trends.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Managing CO2 under global and country-specific net-zero emissions targets in Europe

The European Union (EU) aims to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. This requires capturing CO2, eventually transporting it to different regions, and either converting it into valuable products or sequestering it underground. Although the target is set for the entire EU, in practice, most of the governance and strategy to attain it remains in the individual member states. Previous literature modelling how Europe can achieve carbon neutrality has either considered only a global CO2 limit or used coarse spatial and temporal representation without proper network modelling. Here, we use a highly-resolved open model of the European sector-coupled energy system, PyPSA-Eur, to explore the impacts of imposing net-zero emissions globally for the entire EU versus imposing carbon neutrality for each country. Forcing net-zero emissions in every country increases system cost by 1.4%, demands varied CO2 prices, and triggers higher investment in direct air capture and renewable capacities. Furthermore, in both scenarios, a significant portion of the captured CO2 is transported across Europe, either directly via CO2 pipelines or indirectly via solid biomass or synthetic methane gas, methanol, and oil. Our research enables quantifying the impact of following a collaborative or self-sufficient carbon management strategy to attain carbon neutrality.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

Designing a sector-coupled European energy system robust to 60 years of historical weather data

As energy systems transform to rely on renewable energy and electrification, they encounter stronger year-to-year variability in energy supply and demand. However, most infrastructure planning is based on a single weather year, resulting in a lack of robustness. In this paper, we optimize energy infrastructure for a European energy system designed for net-zero CO$_2$ emissions in 62 different weather years. Subsequently, we fix the capacity layouts and simulate their operation in every weather year, to evaluate resource adequacy and CO$_2$ emissions abatement. We show that interannual weather variability causes variation of $\pm$10\% in total system cost. The most expensive capacity layout obtains the lowest net CO$_2$ emissions but not the highest resource adequacy. Instead, capacity layouts designed with years including compound weather events result in a more robust and cost-effective design. Deploying CO$_2$-emitting backup generation is a cost-effective robustness measure, which only increase CO$_2$ emissions marginally as the average CO$_2$ emissions remain less than 1\% of 1990 levels. Our findings highlight how extreme weather years drive investments in robustness measures, making them compatible with all weather conditions within six decades of historical weather data.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2023

Distributed photovoltaics provides key benefits for a highly renewable European energy system

Distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are projected to be a key contributor to future energy landscape, but are often poorly represented in energy models due to their distributed nature. They have higher costs compared to utility PV, but offer additional advantages, e.g., in terms of social acceptance. Here, we model the European power network with a high spatial resolution of 181 nodes and a 2-hourly temporal resolution. We use a simplified model of distribution and transmission networks that allows the representation of power distribution losses and differentiates between utility and distributed generation and storage. Three scenarios, including a sector-coupled scenario with heating, transport, and industry are investigated. The results show that incorporating distributed solar PV leads to total system cost reduction in all scenarios (1.4% for power sector, 1.9-3.7% for sector-coupled). The achieved cost reductions primarily stem from demand peak reduction and lower distribution capacity requirements because of self-consumption from distributed solar. This also enhances self-sufficiency for countries. The role of distributed PV is noteworthy in the sector-coupled scenario and is helped by other distributed technologies including heat pumps and electric vehicle batteries.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2022

Comparative analysis of PV configurations for agrivoltaic systems in Europe

Agrivoltaics (APV) is the dual use of land by combining agricultural crop production and photovoltaic (PV) systems. In this work, we have analyzed three different APV configurations: static with optimal tilt, vertically-mounted bifacial, and single-axis horizontal tracking. A model is developed to calculate the shadowing losses on the PV panels along with the reduced solar irradiation reaching the area under them for different PV capacity densities. First, we investigate the trade-offs using a location in Denmark as a case study and second, we extrapolate the analysis to the rest of Europe. We find that the vertical and single-axis tracking produce more uniform irradiance on the ground, and a capacity density of around 30 W/m2 is suitable for APV systems. Based on our model and a 100 m-resolution land cover database, we calculate the potential for APV in every NUTS-2 region within the European Union (EU). The potential for APV is enormous as the electricity generated by APV systems could produce 28 times the current electricity demand in Europe. Overall, the potential capacity for APV in Europe is 51 TW, which would result in an electricity yield of 71500 TWh/year.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2022

Cost and efficiency requirements for a successful electricity storage in a highly renewable European energy system

Future highly renewable energy systems might require substantial storage deployment. At the current stage, the technology portfolio of dominant storage options is limited to pumped-hydro storage and Li-Ion batteries. It is uncertain which storage design will be able to compete with these options. Considering Europe as a case study, we derive the cost and efficiency requirements of a generic storage technology, which we refer to as storage-X, to be deployed in the cost-optimal system. This is performed while including existing pumped-hydro facilities and accounting for the competition from stationary Li-ion batteries, flexible generation technology, and flexible demand in a highly renewable sector-coupled energy system. Based on a sample space of 724 storage configurations, we show that energy capacity cost and discharge efficiency largely determine the optimal storage deployment, in agreement with previous studies. Here, we show that charge capacity cost is also important due to its impact on renewable curtailment. A significant deployment of storage-X in a cost-optimal system requires (a) discharge efficiency of at least 95%, (b) discharge efficiency of at least 50% together with low energy capacity cost (10EUR/kWh), or (c) discharge efficiency of at least 25% with very low energy capacity cost (2EUR/kWh). Comparing our findings with seven emerging technologies reveals that none of them fulfill these requirements. Thermal Energy Storage (TES) is, however, on the verge of qualifying due to its low energy capacity cost and concurrent low charge capacity cost. Exploring the space of storage designs reveals that system cost reduction from storage-X deployment can reach 9% at its best, but this requires high round-trip efficiency (90%) and low charge capacity cost (35EUR/kW).

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2022

The Potential Role of a Hydrogen Network in Europe

Electricity transmission expansion has suffered many delays in Europe in recent decades, despite its significance for integrating renewable electricity into the energy system. A hydrogen network which reuses the existing fossil gas network could not only help to supply demand for low-emission fuels, but could also to 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 and self-sufficient European energy system with high shares of renewables. We cover the electricity, buildings, transport, agriculture, and industry sectors across 181 regions and model every third hour of a year. With this high spatio-temporal resolution, the model can capture bottlenecks in transmission networks, the variability of demand and renewable supply, as well as regional opportunities for the retrofitting of legacy gas infrastructure and the development of geological hydrogen storage. Our results show consistent system cost reductions with a pan-continental hydrogen network that connects regions with low-cost and abundant renewable potentials to demand centres, synthetic fuel production and cavern storage sites. Developing a hydrogen network reduces system costs by up to 26 billion Euros per year (3.4%), with the highest benefits when electricity grid reinforcements cannot be realised. Between 64% and 69% of this network could be built from repurposed natural gas pipelines. However, we find that hydrogen networks can only partially substitute for power grid expansion. While the expansion of both networks together can achieve the largest cost savings of 10%, the expansion of neither is truly essential as long as higher costs can be accepted and regulatory changes are made to manage grid bottlenecks.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2022

Endogenous learning for green hydrogen in a sector-coupled energy model for Europe

Many studies have shown that hydrogen could play a large role in the energy transition for hard-to-electrify sectors, but previous modelling has not included the necessary features to assess its role. They have either left out important sectors of hydrogen demand, ignored the temporal variability in the system or neglected the dynamics of learning effects. We address these limitations and consider learning-by-doing for the full green hydrogen production chain with different climate targets in a detailed European sector-coupled model. Here, we show that in the next 10 years a faster scale-up of electrolysis and renewable capacities than envisaged by the EU in the REPowerEU Plan is cost-optimal in order to reach the +1.5{\deg}C target. This reduces the costs for hydrogen production to 1.26 Eur/kg by 2050. Hydrogen production switches from grey to green hydrogen, omitting the option of blue hydrogen. If electrolysis costs are modelled without dynamic learning-by-doing, then the electrolysis scale-up is significantly delayed, while total system costs are overestimated by up to 13% and the levelised cost of hydrogen is overestimated by 67%.

physics.soc-ph↗