Macro-energy system modeling: BRIDGES

Macro-energy system analysis is crucial as it provides a comprehensive view of how energy systems operate and evolve, offering valuable insights for policymakers and businesses in the energy sector. For policymakers, it serves as a guide for crafting informed regulations, subsidies, and policies that can drive the energy transition while ensuring reliability and affordability. For companies, it highlights business opportunities by identifying growing markets and the potential for innovation in energy generation, storage, and transmission technologies. This broader perspective is essential in identifying bottlenecks, infrastructure gaps, or regulatory hurdles, which hinder the pace of transition towards sustainable, resilient, and scalable energy solutions.

In our group we are developing the macro-energy system model BRIDGES capable of determining optimal transition pathways to a net-zero emission energy system. The underlying large-scale linear optimization problem is designed to identify investment decisions that minimize the total societal costs of the transition path while satisfying tightening emission constraints. Such investment decisions can include the commissioning and decommissioning of renewable and fossil-based electricity generators, energy storage as well as the electrification of the building and transport sectors. The model chooses from a wide range of energy conversion technologies. One of the model's strengths is the detailed modeling of both the electricity and the gas network, thus allowing for the planning of the co-transition of the electricity and gas sector.

To reduce the computational complexity of high-resolution energy system analysis, the group is also developing time-series aggregation algorithms that efficiently identify representative time periods in energy consumption and weather data. Particular emphasis is placed on incorporating extreme events, as accurately modeling these scenarios is crucial for assessing the resilience and robustness of energy systems.

An early version of the code base can be found here. We are working on making the current model and documentation available online.