CO2-Reduced Energy Scenarios in Italy: Combined Modelling of Renewable Energy Sources, CCS and Hydrogen Penetration in the End-User Uses

Climate change and greenhouse emissions are becoming an important issue to be solved. Europe and the whole world continuously set new targets on the CO2 emitting sectors to accelerate the contribution of the different States in maintaining the global temperature at acceptable values. The Italian Government has stated challenging objectives to be achieved on energy and climate matter by 2030. The installation of intermittent renewable energy systems (IRES), implementation of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) on existing power plants and hydrogen penetration in the end-user uses could be important technologies to reach these objectives. This paper analyses future energy scenarios to occur by 2030 through the modelling of the Italian future energy system in the software EnergyPlan. Results show that the simultaneous demonstration of the Italian CO2 emissions target and low values of electricity curtailments could be obtained through the diversification of the technologies and the combined modelling of an increase of IRES plants installation, CCS and hydrogen use as a novel energy vector in different sectors.