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