Land and Marine Use Implications for High-Penetration Renewable Energy Systems

Achieving climate change mitigation goals will likely require increasing the shares of variable renewable energy (VRE) from around 15% today to at least 70% by mid-century. Best-in-class macro-energy systems (MES) models explore important features of potential systems but make computational trade-offs in their resolution of grid features, weather, and land and marine spatial use. In this talk, I will review the main methodological approaches to VRE planning and their limitations, and describe new optimization formulations that co-optimize land, marine and grid impacts. When considering land availability, results show an increasing favorability toward distributed solar over utility-scale, even before considering favorable incentives. Yet, drivers of land and marine spatial availability - including land and marine use policies and social acceptance - are not well characterized in major geographies, nor how they may change over time. Model developments are considering non-linear effects such as land contiguity and heterogeneous project size effects on cost and acceptance.

Speaker: Michael Davidson, UC San Diego