Study of the Western Europe energy transition : an EROI-based analysis resorting on typical days

As industrialized countries begin to apprehend the energetic transition, high efforts are being poured in the development of a self-sustainable, efficient and carbon-free society. In order to fulfill this transition, renewables must become the major energy production system of our society. As this noble objective is globally shared, this abrupt transition is not without consequences and challenges. Because of the inherently intermittent energy production, renewables have to be coupled with optimized energy storage. The implementation of these challenging future energy systems has to be modeled beforehand. This study uses an Energy Return On Investment (EROI) optimizing model developed at UCLouvain in 2018 to simulate the energetic transition of North West Europe based on a scenario developed by the European Commission. In order to do so, the existing model has been enhanced with the "typical days" method, allowing for a lower computation time without affecting the results. Thanks to this new model, this study was able to highlight three notable results. During the energetic transition, a correlation was shown between the gas & coal share and the total export of one's country. The total emissions of North West Europe should decrease within the European Commissions plan, but not within the boundaries proposed by the European Union. Finally, the EROI has been shown to decrease with an increasing share of renewables thus questioning the energetic relevance of high shares of renewables in North West Europe.