After having reviewed the three key ways to help integrate variable renewable electricity generation into the electricity system – grids, storage, and flexibility – we now look a way to make decisions on trade-offs between these different strategies: energy system models. They are thought experiments to systematically and quantitatively guide planning and policy, but their results need to be interpreted with care.

Key takeaways:

• Many options and combinations of technologies are possible to build a climate-neutral electricity supply
• Energy system models can help systematically quantify feasible combinations of them and trade-offs between different possible systems
• These models are usually formulated as optimization problems to minimize cost, and are therefore particularly sensitive to the technology costs assumed