Impact of renewable energy hubs configurations on the national infrastructure

This research presents a framework to identify and integrate typical districts in a national energy system to assess the impact of decentralized energy hub configurations. The framework includes a two-step global sensitivity analysis to determine the model’s most influential parameters and explore the districts’ solution space. The application of the framework on 10 representative districts of Switzerland reveals a variety of configurations for the built environment. Integrating these solutions into the national model indicates a 15% increase in annual costs due to a higher space heating demand of the built environment. The decentralized approach focuses on the deployment of PV within urban areas with a third of the total capacity of the centralized approach, while the distribution of decentralized technologies is the same for both models. The impact of feed-in tariff variation allows for identifying a levelized cost of electricity within each district. Districts in urban areas have a lower levelized cost of electricity than those in rural areas due to higher PV penetration. Overall, this frame- work provides insights into the potential to deploy renewable energy sources at the district level and the required investments to reach energy independence and carbon neutrality in the country.