Energy System Modeling and Pathways
The interrelations between the economics, policy-making and physics of the energy system are quite complex but it is of crucial importance to understand these relationships when identifying pathways to achieve rapidly decreasing emissions in the energy sector. Hence, in the past years, PSL has been a leading part of a major collaborative effort within ETH initiated by the Energy Science to build Nexus-e, a modeling and simulation platform that captures these complex interdependencies and provides insights into the future of the Swiss electric energy system.
The platform is built in a modular form and computes the most economical expansion of the system to supply the future demand taking into account resulting market dispatch, reliability of the system and the macroeconomic environment. The results generated within this project have gained significant attention by the Swiss Department of Energy. Parallel and complementary to this effort, researchers at PSL are investigating the modeling of the electrification of the transportation sector and the interactions of the gas system with the electric power system. The plan is to integrate these aspects also into the Nexus-e platform to provide an even more holistic view of the energy system.
