highRES-Europe: The high spatial and temporal Resolution Electricity System model for Europe
James Price, Marianne Zeyringer
Abstract
The high spatial and temporal resolution electricity system model, highRES, is used to design cost-effective, flexible and weather resilient electricity systems for Great Britain and Europe. The model is specifically designed to analyse the effects of high shares of variable renewables and explore integration/flexibility options. As the proportion of renewables in electricity generation increases, there will be increasing imbalances between electricity demand and supply. highRES is a high-resolution electricity system model that simultaneously considers infrastructure planning (investment) and operational (dispatch) decisions to identify the most cost-effective strategies to cope with growing shares of intermittent renewables. It does this by comparing and trading off potential options to integrate renewables into the system including the extension of the transmission grid, interconnection with other countries, building flexible generation (e.g. gas power stations), renewable curtailment and energy storage. highRES is written in GAMS and its objective is to minimise power system investment and operational costs to meet hourly demand, subject to a number of unit and system constraints. It can model a variety of technical characteristics of thermal generators (e.g. ramping restrictions, minimum stable generation, startup costs, minimum up and down times) depending on the requirements of the research question, their CO2 emissions, and the technical characteristics of a variety of energy storage options. The transmission grid is represented using a linear transport model.