Investigation into sustainable energy systems in Nordic municipalities

Sammanfattning: Municipal energy systems in Nordic environments face multiple challenges: the cold climate, large-scale industries, a high share of electric heating and long distances drive energy consumption. While actions on the demand side minimize energy use, decarbonization efforts in mining, industries, the heating and the transport sector can increase the consumption of electricity and biofuels. Continued growth of intermittent wind and solar power increases supply, but the planned phase out of Swedish nuclear power will pose challenges to the reliability of the electricity system in the Nordic countries. Bottlenecks in the transmission and distribution grids may restrict a potential growth of electricity use in urban areas, limit new intermittent supply, peak electricity import and export. Environmental concerns may limit growth of biomass use. Local authorities are committed in contributing to national goals on mitigating climate change, while considering their own objectives for economic development, increased energy self-sufficiency and affordable energy costs.Given these circumstances, this thesis investigates existing technical and economic potentials of renewable energy (RE) resources in the Nordic countries with a focus on the northern counties of Finland, Norway and Sweden. The research further aims to provide sets of optimal solutions for sustainable Nordic municipal energy systems, where the interaction between major energy sectors are studied, considering multiple objectives of minimizing annual energy system costs and reducing carbon emissions as well as analyzing impacts on peak electricity import and export.This research formulates an integrated municipal energy system as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP), which is solved by interfacing the energy system simulation tool EnergyPLAN with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) implemented in Matlab. In a first step, the integration or coupling of electricity and heating sectors is studied, and in a second step, the study inquires the impacts of an increasingly decarbonized transport sector on the energy system. Sensitivity analysis on key economic parameters and on different grid emission factors is performed. Piteå (Norrbotten County, Sweden) is a typical Nordic municipality, which serves as a case study for this research.The research concludes that significant techno-economic potentials exist for the investigated resources. Optimization results show that CO2 emissions of a Nordic municipal energy system can be reduced by about 60% without a considerable increase in total energy system costs and that peak electricity import can be reduced by up to 38%. The outlook onto 2030 shows that the transport sector could be composed of high electrification shares and biofuels. Technology choices for optimal solutions are highly sensitive to electricity prices, discount rates and grid emission factors.The inquiries of this research provide important insights about carbon mitigation strategies for integrated energy sectors within a perspective on Nordic municipalities. Future work will refine the transport model, develop and apply a framework for multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) enabling local decision makers to determine a technically and economically sound pathway based on the optimal alternatives provided, and analyze the existing policy framework affecting energy planning of local authorities.