Impacts of Climate Change on European Electricity and Heating Systems

The European Commission have developed a long-term energy strategy that, if successful, will result in net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. This may be achieved in part by designing future energy systems with a close link between the electricity and other end-use sectors. Such well-integrated systems take decades to engineer, which allows for additional climate change. Time is therefore a significant constraint and timely mitigation strategies are important. In this dissertation, I focus on the impact of climate change on future European electricity and heating systems and present a selection of my first-authored articles on this topic. Initially, I treat these sectors separately, but by the end, I focus on the potential benefits of designing a closely linked European electricity and heating system. To represent a broad range of climate outcomes for the 21st Century, I adopt three representative climate projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Based on the underlying assumptions of these projections, the World Climate Research Programme developed state-of-the-art weather data for the 21st Century that is made available for further research. I use weather data from nine independent climate models to generate climate change affected energy system data for this project. The large ensemble of data defines the foundation of this project and is used in all analyses. The electricity sector is fundamental in the energy systems and with its rising share of renewable power production it becomes important to investigate into its resilience to climate change. In the article "21st Century Climate Change Impacts on Key Properties of a Large-Scale Renewable-Based Electricity System", I have shown that highly renewable electricity systems might perform equally well at the end of this century as of now. This is in particular an interesting result for coupling other end-use sectors with the power sector. Measured data on space heating is not available on country scale, nor are highly granular estimates. To this end, I have developed a coherent method that can be used for this purpose. The method is presented in the paper "Estimating country-specific space heating threshold temperatures from national gas and electricity consumption data", and shows that current results can improve significantly by including weather and primary energy use. In the paper "Impact of climate change on the cost optimal mix of decentralized heating in Europe", I uncover that the need for space heating may reduce significantly depending on the degree of climate change. With a careful modelling of the coefficient of performance, I show that heat pumps become more economically feasible with rising ambient temperatures. I conclude this dissertation with an ongoing research, which shows that a closely linked power and heating system reduces the system cost by up to 10%. The impact of climate change and the CO2-constraints have a considerably higher impact, with system costs ranging from below 30% of the historical reference point to 90% above, depending on the projection

Grid integration of solar PV for multi-apartment buildings

Several studies show that large installations of rooftop solar PV in residential low voltage grids, typically with many single family dwellings, may cause overvoltage issues during mid-day when local consumption is low and solar PV electricity generation high. Different so-called smart grid technologies, which often requires additional control, communication and monitoring equipment have been suggested to alleviate these and related problems. In this paper, solar PV integration is studied in the context of multi-apartment buildings where the rooftop potential is significant. To this end, the medium voltage grids of two multi-apartment areas, Bärnstenen and Alabastern in Vaxjö, Sweden are used as study cases. For these areas, it is found that active smart grid control or the introduction of new controllable load is not required. This finding applies to cases with very large solar PV installations corresponding to full coverage of the available rooftops and an annual yield corresponding to about eight times the annual electricity consumption. The conclusion is that multi-apartment residential areas may be ideally suited for large-scale solar PV installations without the need for smart grid infrastructure. These findings are contrary to, but not in disagreement with previous findings for low voltage residential grids

Impact of Climate Change on the Backup Infrastructure of Highly Renewable Electricity Systems

The global climate is currently undergoing vast changes due to the high concentrations of carbon dioxide within the atmosphere. This is already evident through the occurrence of more extreme weather events around the globe. Consequently, in this work the impact of climate change on highly weather dependent electricity systems is assessed by quantifying the extreme needs for dispatchable energy. Large-scale weather data with 3 hourly resolution, from the EURO-CORDEX project are used, reflecting three different projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of possible climate outcomes for the 21st century. It is found that the end-of-century period projected by two representative concentration pathways, RCP2.6 and RCP4.5, slightly increases the need for dispatchable backup energy. On the other hand, the RCP8.5 emission scenario leads to more significant increases. The demand for dispatchable energy happens to occur temporally highly clustered which introduce challenges to the electricity systems. Energy storage may be applied to handle the extreme electricity demands. To investigate this possibility, a simple theoretical modelling of energy storage is presented

Modulation of Innate and Adaptive Immune Responses by Arabinoxylans

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Fadel, A., Plunkett, A., Li, W., & Ashworth, J. J. (2017). Modulation of Innate and Adaptive Immune Responses by Arabinoxylans. Journal of Food Biochemistry, 42(2), e12473. http://doi.org/10.1111/jfbc.12473, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jfbc.12473/abstract. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-ArchivingHumans are exposed to harmful pathogens and a wide range of noxious substances every day.The immune system reacts to, and destroys, these pathogens and harmful substances. The immunesystem is composed of innate and adaptive immunity, which liaise to protect the host and maintainhealth. Foods, especially cereals, have been reported to modulate the immune response.Arabinoxylans are nonstarch polysaccharides that have been shown to possess immune-modulatory activities. This review article discusses the fundamentals of the immune system andprovides an overview of the immunomodulatory potential of arabinoxylans in conjunction withtheir structural characteristics and proposed similarities with lipopolysaccharide

Maktfullkomliga politiker, olönsamma kvinnor och männens ryggdunkarklubbar. En kritisk diskursanalys om hur tre svenska dagstidningar framställer kvotering till styrelser

Syftet med denna studie var att få en förståelse om hur svensk dagspress, utifrån ledarsidor och debattartiklar, framställer kvotering. För att kunna besvara vårt syfte baserades studien på en diskursanalys. Den teoretiska referensramen utgick från Faircloughs kritiska diskursanalys som bestod av tre dimensioner; text, social och diskursiv praktik. Vidare hämtades materialet till resultatet med utgångspunkt i de tre dimensionerna, till exempel genom att markera värdeladdade ord i artiklarna som motsvarade dimensionen om text i Faircloughs kritiska diskursanalys. Studiens resultat bidrog till att identifiera två teman som berördes i tidningarna, kvinnor och lönsamhet samt jämställdhet, detta diskuterades i analysen. Studien visade slutligen att framställning av kvotering såg olika ut och att vardera tidnings inställning till kvotering var i linje med deras politiska hemvist

Supplementary Data: 21st Century climate change impacts on key properties of a large-scale renewable-based electricity system

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