“I can, of course, make any basic assumptions in a sce-
nario; however, we must always address the question of
whether these are realistic and will lead to a consistent devel-
opment path,” says Thomas Pregger, describing the difficulty
of the task. When systems analysts create a target-oriented
scenario, they look from a specific point in the future, where
certain goals are expected to have been met, back to the pre-
sent. In this way, for example, an energy supply that involves
up to 80 percent renewable energies can be assumed as a tar-
get. The researchers use this ‘backcasting’ to look for, or rather,
to compute the necessary investment and actions we need to
consider today to achieve the desired situation in the future.
“This means that the scenarios are not prognoses for the fu-
ture; rather they show which steps must be taken to achieve
certain goals. Hence, we are describing a potential path and
its consequences for the political world and energy policy,”
Pregger says, describing his area of activity.
Looking back from the future helps in the search for the
right path
Before Pregger and his colleagues get started, they collect
data on the current situation. Statistics from the International En-
ergy Agency (IEA), the World Energy Outlook or the Federal Min-
istry of Economics are fundamental to the energy scenarios.
Among other things, the researchers are interested in the follow-
ing parameters: the gross domestic product, current energy con-
sumption, the generation facilities, anticipated economic and
population development, renewable resources and the expected
Greenpeace International has not been making things easy for Thomas Pregger, a project leader in the Department
of Systems Analysis and Technology Assessment, and his team at the DLR Institute of Technical Thermodynamics in
Stuttgart. The systems analysts have been developing the global energy scenario ‘Energy[R]evolution’ under contract
to Greenpeace. The research shows what safe and sustainable energy supply in 2050 could look like. The client set out
extensive framework conditions for the scenario: progressive global phasing out of nuclear energy and carbon fuels,
strict limitation of biomass, oil and gas consumption, a significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions through the
use of renewable solutions, while taking into account the natural limitations of our environment.
Energy systems analysis – an ever better view of the future for
energy supply
By Dorothee Bürkle
Knowing what would happen if …
As well as the Greenpeace ‘Energy[R]evolution’ study, the DLR
systems analysts have, in 2012 and under a contract from the
German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conserva-
tion and Nuclear Safety, published the ‘2011 Pilot Study’ and a
study on employment development in the renewable energy
sector. With funding from the Federal Ministry of Economics and
Technology, they have produced a study on potential develop-
ments in electric mobility by 2050. During the course of this year
the researchers will publish a Mediterranean Solar Atlas, com-
prehensively describing the potential for solar energy in the
Mediterranean countries for the first time.
changes in price for technologies and energy sources. “Our analy-
sis work basically starts here, because often the various data sets
do not match each other well,” says Pregger of this phase of the
task. For example, the international statistics for energy consump-
tion do not have any separate figures for industry, commerce and
private households. “In such a case, we run a comparison with
national statistics or research and use this to prepare our data be-
fore we feed it into our scenario database.”
At this point the researchers also define the limits for
their scenario. What natural resources in terms of wind power
or biomass, for example, are available in a country or region?
How can the expansion of renewable energies be represented
with the most stable market growth possible? What is the po-
tential for community and district heating? When all this has
been determined, the energy balance calculations can begin in
a scenario model, where the physical and economic interrela-
tionships between the input variables are determined. One of
the tools the DLR researchers work with to achieve this is the
Modular Energy System Analysis and Planning (MESAP) tool
from Seven2one Informationssysteme GmbH in Karlsruhe. A
very detailed description of renewable energy sources is pro-
duced using the ARES model (Ausbau Regenerativer Ener-
giesysteme – Development of Renewable Energy Systems),
which the department has developed itself and is constantly
expanding.
Based on the additional capacity of the various energy
technologies, the programme determines the required invest-
ment, the costs incurred, the level of long-term economic ben-
efit and the effects this has on a country’s power and heat
generation costs. Even so, the researchers do not regard the
scenario programme as a black box. They constantly check the
path from the initial situation to the one desired for the future,
critically scrutinise whether the additional capacity of a specific
energy technology is realistic, and determine whether the
need for energy will actually be satisfied at that time. “It’s a
long route for us to get to a coherent scenario. We change
and recompute the parameters up to 50 times until we finally
arrive at a self-consistent, reliable scenario,” says Pregger, de-
scribing this step of the process. The researchers generally
compute a number of paths. Hence, they have generated mul-
tiple scenarios for their pilot study on energy supply in Germa-
ny up to 2050. The main scenarios are principally oriented to-
wards the primary goal of the Federal Government’s energy
policy, which is a reduction of at least 80 percent in greenhouse
Image: Wolfgang Dirscherl_pixelio.de
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