R&D NESTER team developed, in an activity performed in the scope of the FlexPlan project, pan-European energy scenarios for three target years: 2030, 2040 and 2050. This activity was developed with the contribution of several partners from the project including grid operators (TERNA, ELES, REN) and research institutions (SINTEF, TU-Dortmund and RSE).

These energy scenarios aim to present different alternatives for the European energy landscape in the considered timeframes and will be used as the main data source to validate the planning tool developed in this project.

This validation will be performed using six regional case studies, involving multiple European countries and whose developments will be performed in a work package leaded by R&D NESTER.

In the performed activity, three different scenarios were considered per target year, totalizing nine scenarios at project level. Complementary, these scenarios were created using well-known and accepted data sources from the industry and academic international communities, obtaining a validation of the created scenarios in this conception phase.

The scenarios developed for 2030 and 2040 are majorly based in the TYNDP 2020, recently released by ENTSO-E and available at https://tyndp.entsoe.eu/.

2050 scenarios are an R&D NESTER adaptation to the previous source, validated using data from the long-term strategy for energy and climate from the European Commission - A Clean Planet For All - available at: https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/strategies/2050_en.

Each scenario presents a pan-European landscape for energy and includes:

·       Total installed capacity per country (and per technology)

·       Annual capacity factors for renewable energy sources

·       Annual electricity consumption and peak load

·       Hourly time series data for consumption

·       Net transfer capacities (NTCs)

·       Total operational reserve power (FCR, FRR)

·       Commodity prices for different types of fuel for nuclear and fossil power station.

The description of the methodology used in the scenario development and the description of additional data used in the project are published in a deliverable (D4.1) created by R&D NESTER, which is publicly available at the FlexPlan website, in https://flexplan-project.eu/publications/.

FlexPlan is a three-year project financed by the Framework Programme Horizon 2020. It started in October 2019 and is developed in a consortium with 13 partners from 8 European countries, including multiple grid operators from transmission and distribution systems. R&D NESTER and REN are active members of this consortium. All project details can be checked at: https://flexplan-project.eu/.

The project aims to create an innovative grid-planning tool, which introduces multiple new functionalities, core to grid planning activities in the current and future power systems context. These include, among other, the utilization of flexibility sources as alternatives to traditional grid expansion measures, probabilistic methods for contingency analysis (replacing or building upon the N-1 criteria) and a full environmental impact study of the different grid expansion measures considered.