Infrastrukturelle und nachfrageseitige Herausforderungen für die Energiewirtschaft: Eine Aufgabe für die Energiesystemanalyse

Due to very ambitious energy-political goals, the German energy sector is currently undergoing a transition. The resulting challenges are identified in this two-part contribution, before suggesting and discussing possible solutions. While the first part is devoted to electricity generation in renewable and conventional plants, this second part focusses on the demand side and infrastructure, followed by the discussion of energy systems analysis as a suitable methodological approach to these problems. The infrastructure is the area within the energy sector with the most challenges, which is why network models on all voltage levels will become more important. Already today bottlenecks can be observed and in the future an increased requirement for network expansion or spatially-distributed storage capacity is expected. Although ecologically not advantageous, the curtailment of renewable energy production will be at least partly unavoidable. Finally, on the demand side economic and other socio-economic motivations are required for the realization of significant energy efficiency potentials. Electric vehicles can considerably increase the fraction of flexible load in the household sector. Industrial companies are currently the only customers with dynamic tariffs; a large challenge is represented by transferring these customer models to the household and service sectors and thereby exploiting demand elasticities.