Energy exchanges between countries for a future low-carbon Western Europe : merging cells in EnergyScope MC to handle wider regions

The European Union wants to be carbon neutral by 2050. This implies a transition of the energy systems, which needs to be planned. In order to be cost-efficient and to capture at best the complexity of the problem, a whole-energy system approach should be adopted. Moreover, some countries cannot reach carbon neutrality independently, hence the transition should take advantage of energy exchanges between countries. In this work, Western Europe is modelled using EnergyScope Multi-Cell to consider interconnections between countries and cover the different sectors of energy production and consumption. The countries energy systems are cost-optimised, under EU's 2030 emission target. The exchanges and operating strategies are analysed. Several energy carriers can be used for exchanges, and the possibility to use hydrogen as a new carrier is assessed. To allow the model to optimise a large region at decent computational cost, a methodology is developed to merge data of neighbouring countries. It results that energy exchanges will help to integrate intermittent renewable energies. Most importantly, onshore wind can be used at full potential globally. Regions that have a high potential −the Iberian Peninsula and Scandinavia− can then supply energy to other regions. This requires large electricity interconnections. Hydrogen exchanges is found useful to reduce the capacity of electricity interconnections: it can cover part of the exchanges, especially the part dedicated to fuel-cell mobility.