ALDEHYDE - locAL DEcarbonization and HYDrogen Export

This repository contains the entire scientific project, including code and report for the paper "The impact of temporal hydrogen regulation on hydrogen exporters and their domestic energy transition".

Abstract

As global demand for green hydrogen rises, potential hydrogen exporters move into the spotlight. However, the large-scale installation of on-grid hydrogen electrolysis for export can have profound impacts on domestic energy prices and energy-related emissions. Our investigation explores the interplay of hydrogen exports, domestic energy transition and temporal hydrogen regulation, employing a sector-coupled energy model in Morocco. We find substantial co-benefits of domestic climate change mitigation and hydrogen exports, whereby exports can reduce domestic electricity prices while mitigation reduces hydrogen export prices. However, increasing hydrogen exports quickly in a system that is still dominated by fossil fuels can substantially raise domestic electricity prices, if green hydrogen production is not regulated. Surprisingly, temporal matching of hydrogen production lowers domestic electricity cost by up to 31% while the effect on exporters is minimal. This policy instrument can steer the welfare (re-)distribution between hydrogen exporting firms, hydrogen importers, and domestic electricity consumers and hereby increases acceptance among actors.

Installation and Usage

1. Open your terminal at a location where you want to install the repository aldehyde including it's subworkflows PyPSA-Earth and PyPSA-Earth-Sec. Type the following in your terminal to download the package and the dependency (pypsa-earth) from GitHub. Note that the tag --recursive-submodules is needed to automatically clone also the pypsa-earth dependency.

       .../some/path/without/spaces % git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/energyLS/aldehyde.git

2. Move the current directory to the head of the repository.

       .../some/path/without/spaces % cd aldehyde

3. The python package requirements are curated in the workflow/subworkflows/pypsa-earth-sec/pypsa-earth/envs/environment.yaml file of the pypsa-earth repository. The environment can be installed using conda or mamba:

        cd aldehyde/workflow/subworkflows/pypsa-earth-sec
       .../aldehyde/pypsa-earth-sec % conda env create -f pypsa-earth/envs/environment.yaml

4. For running the optimization one has to install the solver. We can recommend the open source HiGHs solver, see more details on solvers in the documentation of PyPSA-Earth.

The total installation time of cloning the repository and installing the environment is approximately 30 mins, given the prior installation of conda or mamba.

Repository structure

• config: contains configuration files for aldehyde (config.yaml) and PyPSA-Earth-Sec (config.pypsa-earth-sec.yaml) for high-level plotting

• report: contains the .tex files for the paper

• workflow/notebooks: contains the Jupyter notebooks used for the evaluation of results

• workflow/scripts: contains the scripts used for the evaluation of results

• workflow/subworkflows: contains the PyPSA-Earth-Sec workflow which includes the PyPSA-Earth workflow. PyPSA-Earth-Sec is based on the configuration in config.paper.yaml and PyPSA-Earth is based on the configuration in config.pypsa-earth.yaml.

Run scenarios

For running the model, navigate to the PyPSA-Earth-Sec model by:

cd workflow/subworkflows/pypsa-earth-sec

To solve all networks, run the following command:

snakemake -j 1 solve_all_networks -n

Please follow the documentation of PyPSA-Earth and the Readme of PyPSA-Earth-Sec for more details. The estimated time to run one single optimization is 40 mins on a standard laptop, the full set of paper results includes over 360 optimizations. To run the full set, a high-performance computer is recommended.

Reproducibility

The paper results and analysis are created on the following commits:s

• aldehyde: on commit https://github.com/energyLS/aldehyde/commit/465750d6f12716c44f77980e8ea56f05997c20ba which includes the submodule of

• PyPSA-Earth-Sec on the commit https://github.com/pypsa-meets-earth/pypsa-earth-sec/tree/6ab3255d5b6f5f9182ddddc04da658ab1902f975 which includes the submodule of

• PyPSA-Earth on the commit https://github.com/pypsa-meets-earth/pypsa-earth/tree/84a0aa4470be9663657aa17540cdf08c8fa0f0b6

Result and input data

A dataset of the model results is available on Zenodo under a CC-BY-4.0 license. Please refer to the documentation of PyPSA-Earth and the Readme of PyPSA-Earth-Sec for details on the input data.

License

The code in this repo is MIT licensed, see ./LICENSE.md.