This research projects deals with fundamental market design issues for zero-carbon energy systems, which has been an area of common research interest since Autumn 2018, and has resulted in several joint publications on the subject. The main research challenge is to propose and analyse candidate solutions for energy market designs that ensures effectiveness, competition and cost recovery of all key technologies in zero-carbon energy systems. This research is not limited to electricity markets, e.g. emerging hydrogen markets are expected to be of high importance in the next decades.

This area focuses on addressing the urgent need for sustainable, secure energy in Europe. The confluence of energy policy in Europe and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has suddenly upset energy supply norms in the continent, sending prices skyrocketing and greatly stressing electricity grids. There is a tremendous need (and therefore a tremendous opportunity) for North America and Norway to supply energy to mainland Europe to replace the 200 Gm³/yr of natural gas and 215 Mt/yr of oil products that used to be sourced from Russia. At the same time, European industry is genuinely seeking lower carbon solutions in nearly all industrial sectors of the economy, creating a double challenge. Both countries are energy-rich and both NTNU and MIT have world-class expertise in researching innovative technological solutions that can take advantage of this position while addressing sustainability needs.

Electrification is receiving much interest as a way of reducing the carbon footprint of many different types of industrial processes. The idea is to displace fossil energy with electricity derived from low-carbon sources, relying on the explosive growth in renewables and the re-surgence of interest in nuclear energy. This task focuses on design, modelling, simulation, optimization, and eco-technoeconomic analysis of key chemical processes with high carbon footprints that are good candidates for electrification. For example, we want to determine the region-specific conditions for when it is better to use electrification technologies (e.g. electric arc heating in steel refining instead of combustion-heat-based) or to rather make H₂ from electricity and in-corporate H₂ supply chains into processing (e.g. H₂ reduction in steel refining instead of coke-based). 

CO₂ emissions from the operation of buildings have increased to their highest level yet (2019) at around 10 GtCO₂, or 28% of total global energy-related CO₂ emissions. With the inclusion of emissions from the buildings construction industry, this share increases to 38% of total global energy-related CO₂ emissions. Estimates suggest that cities are responsible for 75% of global CO₂ emissions, with transport and buildings being among the largest contributors. While contributing to a large part of the CO₂ emissions, buildings, neighborhoods and cities also provide a unique opportunity to address several of the challenges, providing opportunities like e.g., local solar energy production by implementation of building/neighborhood integrated photovoltaics, energy efficiency through building renovation, city planning for carbon neutral mobility, building and neighborhood energy storge systems, energy flexibility through smart building controls etc. The different climate mitigation technologies/solutions can be developed, optimized and implemented to match the demand of the respective scale (from buildin to neigbourhood and city scale) and provide services (e.g. energy flexibility, energy efficiency, and local energy production) to the energy system, and in this way contribute to a CO₂ neutral society.

This project focuses on methodological developments for multiscale modelling and algorithms for integrated energy systems. The motivation is the need to be able to combine long term capacity expansion and investment decisions while considering short-term uncertainty in load and intermittent energy supply. Short-term uncertainty is related to weather for example through temperature, wind speeds and solar irradiance. In integrated energy systems with multiple energy vectors, system flexibility can be built in through storage, demand side management and substitution effects between for example heat and electricity. Multiscale models with both short-term and long-term time periods are ideal to study this, but special structure must often be included in order to avoid an explosion in size.