Techno-economic analysis of the future European Power System

The European Union and other European countries have imposed targets to drastically reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases in the future. Those targets are from a today´s perspective very ambitious making an extensive restructuring of the electric power system necessary, principally because the inclusion of renewables. Concerning this restructuration not a single but multiple paths are possible and therefore the decisive question is which path to follow. Scientific valuating the impact of future designs and technologies are therefore advantageous and can be used by policy makers to set incentives to enforce the optimal path. The presented paper deals with this question by analyzing the optimal mix of generation, storage units and transmission capacities for the EU by the year 2050 under different political frameworks and techno-economical boundaries. The results show how these frameworks and boundaries technically and economically impact the future European Power System.