Wolf-Peter Schill is deputy head of the Department Energy, Transportation, Environment at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) and leads the research area “Transformation of the Energy Economy”. After studying environmental engineering at TU Berlin and Macquarie University Sydney, he obtained a doctoral degree in energy economics at TU Berlin. His research focuses on renewable energy integration, energy storage, electric mobility, and other sector coupling strategies.

His methodological focus is open-source power sector modeling. At DIW Berlin, he has led various research projects, funded with grants from German federal ministries and the European Commission, and published numerous articles in leading international peer-reviewed journals. He is an active member of the Leibniz Research Alliance Energy Transition, the National Platform Future of Mobility, the ESYS working group Hydrogen Economy 2030, and the Australian-German Energy Transition Hub.

Keynote: Flexibility in the electricity sector through storage and sector coupling: insights from numerical
modeling

Date and time: Thursday, 11th November at 13:30 – 14:00 (Helsinki time)

Wind and solar power play a main role in decarbonized future energy systems. Due to their variable nature, the need for temporal flexibitity in power sectors increases. Aside from various electricity storage technologies, sector coupling can also provide such flexibility. This is because sector coupling often involves other types of energy storage, for example, vehicle batteries, heat storage, or hydrogen storage. In this talk, I provide a conceptual overview of the changing storage needs in systems with increasing shares of variable renewable energy sources, and illustrate the effects that sector coupling strategies may have. I also provide examples of more detailed numerical analyses on the flexibility aspects of power-to-heat and power-to-mobility applications.