The EPIC Africa project is a European Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. It aims to support sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa, by establishing and connecting a transition platform with stakeholders in dialogue, up to the development of a long-term engagement tool for the water-energy-food nexus. The optimal use of shared resources will be illustrated for Africa using the cases of the Volta and Tana river basins.
Goals
To achieve Millennium Development Goal 7, there is a need to significantly increase the share of renewable energy, which is abundant on the African continent. However, solar and wind energy are variable in nature, hence the need for energy storage to match supply and demand, manage peaks, allow electricity arbitrage and minimise the need for curtailment. To date, energy storage has not been widely adopted in integrated assessment models (IAMs), as these models tend to take a large system perspective. In the OSeMOSYS open source modelling system, simplifications have been adopted to manage complexity, allow modularity and computational requirements. If storage is not represented at a sufficiently detailed level, however, the resulting loss of dynamic connection between subsystems can lead to inconclusive conclusions. For the open-source tool OSeMOSYS, Palombelli et al. (2020) have recently introduced an improved representation of storage by modelling storage losses – all with little additional computational effort. In this project, we will continue to develop storage functionalities to enable the evaluation of battery-assisted microgrids, pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) and large-scale hydrogen production in specific case applications. Overall, specific innovations include:
- Optimised geospatial design of access to electricity taking into account the interactions of the WEF nexuses through CLEWs
- Governance of the WEF via the operationalisation of the concept of transition arenas to explore the interactions between science and policy.
- Long-term WEF model and operational optimisation model smoothly linked while taking into account storage technologies Battery storage, hydrogen storage and pumped hydro storage for optimal renewable energy planning.
- Seamless coupling of long-term planning and operational models for robust iterative planning of WEF infrastructure, including energy storage.
- Expand the envelope of basin-wide cooperation through basin-wide operational control models to mitigate climate and market uncertainties/risks through model-based tradeoffs.
- A CLEWs data observatory: a growing platform to seamlessly integrate access to multi-source CLEWs, infrastructure and socio-economic datasets needed for planning and operational decisions.
EPIC Africa aims to support sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)
The consortium includes the following partners
TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITEIT DELFT (TUD
KUNGLIGA TEKNISKA HOEGSKOLAN (KTH)
VLAAMSE INSTELLING VOOR TECHNOLOGISCH ONDERZOEK N.V. (VITO)
TRANS-AFRICAN HYDRO-METEOROLOGICAL OBSERVATORY (TAHMO)
VOLTA BASIN AUTHORITY (VBA)
UNIVERSITY OF ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES (UENR)
KENYA AGRICULTURAL AND LIVESTOCK RESEARCH ORGANISATION (KALRO)
Read more: https://www.epicafrica.eu/