Energy Strategy Reviews 26 (2019) 100366
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Energy Strategy Reviews
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/esr
Editorial
Preface to the special issue on “Energy transition and decarbonisation pathways for the EU”
The EU is defining deep decarbonisation strategies for its energy
system. Though policy targets are partly set, it remains uncertain to
what extent they can become more ambitious and what role national
governments, societies, sectors of the economy and technologies will
play in meeting them. Research and Innovation will likely be key to
such deep change, but it may play out in numerous ways.
Computational models can provide insights into potential dec-
arbonisation pathways, create a ground for consultations and help
roadmap long-term strategies. Yet, energy system modelling efforts
across Europe are scattered, attempts towards inclusive and structured
EU-wide fora bringing researchers and EU policy makers are scarce and
transparency of modelling tools is in many cases limited.
With this view, the Energy Modelling Platform for Europe (EMP-E)
was created in 2017 as part of the effort of the Horizon 2020 REEEM
project, funded under the Low Carbon Energy call LCE21-2015, and is
currently jointly organised by nine EU-funded projects.
The EMP-E aims to provide a peer-reviewed digest of models and
policy insights to inform the transition towards a low-carbon European
society, vis-à-vis the Energy Union and Climate objectives. It brings
together researchers from across Europe and EU policy makers. It fa-
cilitates the transition towards new open and transparent modelling
paradigms.
The Special Issue Energy Transition and Decarbonisation pathways for
the EU collects outcomes of and hot topics covered at the first EMP-E
meeting, held on May 17th-18th, 2017, at the European Commission's
Directorate General for Research and Innovation premises.
This Special Issue does not merely present a collection of articles
covering a pre-defined topic. It provides a synthesis of highly com-
plementary tools, practices, experiences and views to inform the re-
search and innovation agenda for the European energy system. The full
set of articles provides a holistic view of technical, cross-sectoral, fi-
nancial, societal challenges of the transition to a low-carbon system.
These challenges reflect research questions, highly relevant for national
energy agencies and EU decision makers.
This knowledge repository is available not only as a number of open
access articles, but also as a number of freely accessible online toolkits.
Among these are toolkits developed within the European Commission,
toolkits traditionally employed in scenario analyses for the EU, emer-
ging open source toolkits and ground-breaking new, open databases.
A solid body of research infrastructure emerges, building on vast
literature and experiences collected in the past few decades, and clearly
∗
Corresponding author.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2019.100366
Available online 06 June 2019
2211-467X/ © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
T
moving towards the establishment of standards for: 1) creating open
modelling tools and structuring open data sets, 2) make existing and
widely-employed modelling tools transparent, 3) juxtaposing new tools
to specifically analyse new challenges.
The Special Issue features two main sets of articles.
One consists of 14 articles focusing on tools and applications to
provide insights into the challenges, costs and solutions for dec-
arbonising the EU energy system. The articles complement each other
by analysing energy system transitions (Bramstoft et al., Capros et al.,
Sakellaris et al., Wiese et al.), variable renewable deployment potential
(Collins et al., Gotzens et al.) and operational issues (Martišauskas
et al.). Analyses span from the EU scale, to national (Balyk et al., Egging
et al.) and city-level cases (Büchele et al., Simoes et al.). Sectoral cov-
erage ranges from specific sectors (such as industry, in Fleiter et al.) to
integrated assessments (Mercure et al.). Newly created open power
systems datasets are of relevance (Hörsch et al.).
Another set of 8 articles reflects on emerging trends in energy sys-
tems analyses through reviews and methodology discussions. A review of
the modelling tools presented at EMP-E 2017 (Müller et al.) and one on
the use of uncertainty (Yue et al.) set the context. Most contributions in
this set map challenges and steps to be undertaken in the opening of
energy models and datasets (Gotzens et al., Hülk et al., Morrison,
Pfenninger et al.). Finally, discussions on other key modelling chal-
lenges add to this body, such as on energy, water, food, land and cli-
mate Nexus (Brouwer et al.) and energy-economy relationships (del
Granado et al.).
A large body of manuscripts was submitted by the participants of
EMP-E 2017, synthesising decades of research from all over Europe on
EU energy system transitions. The final outcome features 22 peer-re-
viewed articles, of which 10 with unlimited full open access and several
presenting results of EU-funded actions.
The Special Issue is introduced by a preface from three Directorates
General of the European Commission: Directorate General for Research
and Innovation, Directorate General Energy and Directorate General
Joint Research Centre.
Francesco Gardumi∗, Georgios Avgerinopoulos, Mark Howells
Department of Energy Technology, Royal Institute of Technology,
Stockholm, Sweden
E-mail address: gardumi@kth.se (F. Gardumi).