On the economics of electrical storage for variable renewable energy sources

The use of renewable energy sources is a major strategy to mitigate climate change. Yet Sinn (2017) argues that excessive electrical storage requirements limit the further expansion of variable wind and solar energy. We question, and alter, strong implicit assumptions of Sinn’s approach and find that storage needs are considerably lower, up to two orders of magnitude. First, we move away from corner solutions by allowing for combinations of storage and renewable curtailment. Second, we specify a parsimonious optimization model that explicitly considers an economic efficiency perspective. We conclude that electrical storage is unlikely to limit the transition to renewable energy.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  European Economic Review

• Publication date

  2018-02-19

• Fields of study

  Physics, Computer Science, Economics, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2018.07.004arXiv 1802.07885
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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