In my post dedicated to the 36th International Energy Workshop which I attended last July, I wrote that the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) had organized a side event during the conference, titled “Planning for the Renewable Future – Improving the representation of variable renewable energy in long-term modelling and tools”. Due to the absolute relevance to my project, I decided to take part in it.

The event essentially consisted in a series of invited interventions – which by the way were interesting and insightful –  followed by a debate open to the audience, where I gave my contribution.

IRENA has produced a report about this event, describing its background and objectives and summarizing all the interventions by the invited speakers and by the audience.

You can download the full document at this webpage, however I directly paste here the part of the report which regards my intervention:

Dr. Samuel Carrara (FEEM, Italy and UC Berkeley, US) shared his experience within the ADVANCE project, working with the integrated assessment model WITCH. From this perspective, most solutions related to better representing VRE-grid integration were based on the direct or indirect implementation of residual load duration curves (RLDCs), complemented by other explicit grid, flexibility, and capacity constraints. In lower resolution integrated assessment models, the issue of time resolution is a challenge, but when comparing their results to more granular model results (from REMix) they found that the models performs well. However, although many researchers have come to a good point in pure modelling of VRE, much more needs to be done in a broader sense to better model expected complementary energy system dynamics around storage, grid and demand response.