EGU21-4505, updated on 04 Mar 2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-4505
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Regional impacts of electricity system transition in Central Europe until 2035

Jan-Philipp Sasse and Evelina Trutnevyte
Jan-Philipp Sasse and Evelina Trutnevyte
  • University of Geneva, Switzerland (jan-philipp.sasse@unige.ch)

Achieving current electricity sector targets in Central Europe (Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland and Switzerland) will redistribute regional benefits and burdens at sub-national level. Limiting emerging regional inequalities would foster the implementation success. We model one hundred scenarios of electricity generation, storage and transmission for 2035 in these countries for 650 regions and quantify associated regional impacts on system costs, employment, greenhouse gas and particulate matter emissions, and land use. We highlight tradeoffs among the scenarios that minimize system costs, maximize regional equality, and maximize renewable electricity generation. Here, we show that these three aims have vastly different implementation pathways as well as associated regional impacts and cannot be optimized simultaneously. Minimizing system costs leads to spatially-concentrated impacts. Maximizing regional equality of system costs has higher, but more evenly distributed impacts. Maximizing renewable electricity generation contributes to minimizing regional inequalities, although comes at higher costs and land use impacts.

How to cite: Sasse, J.-P. and Trutnevyte, E.: Regional impacts of electricity system transition in Central Europe until 2035, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-4505, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-4505, 2021.