Dear openmods,
first of all, I would like to say hello - I’ve been an energy modeller at the Instrat Foundation, Warsaw, for over a year now; in that time I had the pleasure to encounter some of you personally, but this is my first post here.
I would like to bring your attention to our recent study, in which we model possible pathways for the Polish energy system (electricity, heat, mobility, hydrogen) until 2040:
Kubiczek, P., Smoleń, M., Żelisko, W. (2023). Poland approaching carbon neutrality. Four scenarios for the Polish energy transition until 2040. Instrat Policy Paper 06/2023. Poland approaching carbon neutrality - Instrat
We base our scenarios on our in-house developed PyPSA-PL model: GitHub - instrat-pl/pypsa-pl: PyPSA-PL: optimisation model of the Polish energy system. The current version of the model (2.1) includes the centralised and decentralised heating sectors, light vehicle mobility (i.e. mostly passenger cars), and hydrogen production. To account for the current reliance of the Polish power system on the ancillary services provided by conventional power plants, we applied the constraint on the maximum hourly SNSP (System Non-Synchronous Penetration - concept developed by TSOs in Ireland).
Our methodology included both dispatch and investment/early retirement optimisation (in all the sectors), under reasonable maximum capacity growth constraints. Some of the interesting findings and challenges we encountered were:
- Maximum SNSP constraint limits residential PV deployment until 2030 in the most ambitious RES scenarios (too much curtailment).
- Residential heat pump capacity is highly sensitive to COP profiles and various cost assumptions (savings in periods of high COP need to compensate for the buildout of necessary natural gas/hydrogen OCGT capacity used at rare periods of low COP).
- Large heat pumps in district heating systems show a very limited deployment (they would necessitate even more OCGT peaker capacity, at the same time displacing CHP units, which supply power in periods of low COP).
- Hydrogen produced in electrolysis starts displacing grey hydrogen only around 2035, even in ambitious RES scenarios (it is more cost-efficient to displace fossil fuels by cleaner energy sources in electricity, heating, and mobility sectors first).
Our work sparked quite a lot of interesting discussions with energy sector stakeholders in Poland and also gained some international coverage (Poland May Replace Coal With Clean Energy Sources by 2040, According to Instrat - Bloomberg).
I would be happy to talk with you about our modelling approach, so feel free to ask any questions. Most likely I will visit the Grenoble workshop in March.
Best regards,
Patryk