Smart electric vehicle charging strategies for sectoral coupling in a city energy system

The decarbonization of city energy systems plays an important role to meet climate targets. We examine the consequences of integrating electric cars and buses into the city energy system (60% of private cars and 100% of public buses), using three different charging strategies in a modelling tool that considers local generation and storage of electricity and heat, electricity import to the city, and investments to achieve net-zero emissions from local electricity and heating in 2050. We find that up to 85% of the demand for the charging of electric cars is flexible and that smart charging strategies can facilitate 62% solar PV in the charging electricity mix, compared to 24% when cars are charged directly when parked. Electric buses are less flexible, but the timing of charging enables up to 32% to be supplied by solar PV. The benefit from smart charging to the city energy system can be exploited when charging is aligned with the local value of electricity in the city. Smart charging for cars reduces the need for investments in stationary batteries and peak units in the city electricity and heating sectors. Thus, our results point to the importance of sectoral coupling to exploit flexibility options in the city electricity, district heating and transport sectors

The Future European Energy System

This open access book analyzes the transition toward a low-carbon energy system in Europe under the aspects of flexibility and technological progress. By covering the main energy sectors – including the industry, residential, tertiary and transport sector as well as the heating and electricity sector – the analysis assesses flexibility requirements in a cross-sectoral energy system with high shares of renewable energies. The contributing authors – all European energy experts – apply models and tools from various research fields, including techno-economic learning, fundamental energy system modeling, and environmental and social life cycle as well as health impact assessment, to develop an innovative and comprehensive energy models system (EMS). Moreover, the contributions examine renewable penetrations and their contributions to climate change mitigation, and the impacts of available technologies on the energy system. Given its scope, the book appeals to researchers studying energy systems and markets, professionals and policymakers of the energy industry and readers interested in the transformation to a low-carbon energy system in Europe

The impact of limited electricity connection capacity on energy transitions in cities

We study the impacts of the connection capacity for electricity transfer between a city and a regional energy system on the design and operation of both systems. The city energy system is represented by the aggregate energy demand of three cities in southern Sweden, and the regional energy system is represented by Swedish electricity price area SE3. We minimize the investment and running costs in the electricity and district heating sectors, considering different levels of connection capacity between the city and the regional energy systems; connection capacities equal to 100%, 75%, 50% and 0% of the maximum city electricity demand. We find that a system design with 50% connection capacity is only 3% more expensive in terms of total costs than a system with 100% connection capacity. However, shifting electricity generation capacity from the regional to the city energy system with 50%, as compared to 100%, connection capacity leads to a higher marginal cost for electricity in the city than in the region. With the highest connection capacities, 75% and 100%, the district heating sector in the city can support wind power integration in the regional energy system by means of power-to-heat operation. Modeling systems with different connection capacities makes our results applicable to other fast-growing cities with potential to increase local electricity production and sector coupling between the electricity, district heating and electrified transport sectors

Empirical Essays on Energy Economics

The main part of this thesis consists of three distinct essays that empirically analyze economic issues related to energy markets in the United States and Europe. The first chapter provides an introduction and discusses the motivation for the different analyses pursued in this thesis. The second chapter examines attention effects in the market for hybrid vehicles. We show that local media coverage, gasoline price changes and unprecedented record gasoline prices have a significant impact on the consumers' attention. As attention is not directly observable, we analyze online search behavior as a proxy for the revealed consumer attention. Our study is based on a unique weekly panel dataset for 19 metropolitan areas in the US. Additionally, we use monthly state-level panel data to show that the adoption rate of hybrid vehicles is robustly related to our measure of attention. Our results show that the consumers' attention fluctuates strongly and systematically. The third chapter shows how the effect of fuel prices varies with the level of electricity demand. It analyzes the relationship between daily prices of electricity, natural gas and carbon emission allowances with a semiparametric varying smooth coefficient cointegration model. This model is used to analyze the market impact of the nuclear moratorium by the German Government in March 2011. Futures prices of electricity, natural gas and emission allowances are used to show that the market efficiently accounts for the suspended capacity and correctly expects that several nuclear plants will not be switched on after the moratorium. In the fourth chapter, we develop a structural vector autoregressive model (VAR) for the German natural gas market. In particular, we illustrate the usefulness of our approach by disentangling the effects of different fundamental influences during four specific events: The financial crisis starting in 2008, the Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute in January 2009, the Libyan civil war in 2011 as well as the cold spell and Russian supply interruption in February 2012. Our results show that the natural gas price is affected by temperature, storage and supply shortfalls in the short term, while the long-term development is closely tied to crude oil and coal prices