Amna Bibi

The transition to renewable energy is pivotal to Europe's sustainable development goals and climate change mitigation efforts. However, harnessing the full potential of renewables requires a nuanced understanding of the spatiotemporal distribution of the production potential. This project aims to advance modeling techniques to evaluate the renewable energy potential across Europe, focusing on timescales exceeding the typical focus of the more established field of energy meteorology. It will also analyze integration strategies for hybrid wind/solar/systems to overcome intermittency issues.

The key objectives are:

• Develop advanced geospatial and time series models to quantify solar and wind renewable energy potentials precisely on a continental spatial scale.
• Investigate the temporal variability in renewable resources using long-term atmospheric reanalysis data. This allows for determining optimal spatial distribution and grid planning to mitigate variability risk.
• Formulate hybrid system simulation models combining different sources of renewable energy generation. While existing research looks at them separately, integrated models can be used to minimize the variance in production.

Methodologically, this project will apply approaches established in other fields of climatology (e.g., glacier modeling) to bridge the resolution gap from global atmospheric data sets to the scale of renewable energy production sites. Starting with analyzing existing energy infrastructure, we will investigate the impact of long-term climate variability on the production potential. We will develop hybrid models, combining different forms of renewable energy production, to expand our analysis (i) using climate projections to investigate the potential impacts of climate change on energy production and (ii) to identify optimal strategies for siting future production installations and routing of power cables.

This project's uniqueness lies in the integrated approach, enabling an optimization (or at least analysis) of the overall and long-term stability of the energy production instead of maximizing the profit of individual production sites. It will significantly advance knowledge of Europe’s prospects for renewable energy resources. The outcomes will be relevant to policy and planning and potentially accelerate sustainable energy transitions across the continent.