Electricity - POLES

Model Documentation - POLES
Model scope and methods - POLES Model concept, solver and details - POLES Temporal dimension - POLES Spatial dimension - POLES Policy - POLES Socio-economic drivers - POLES Population - POLES Economic activity - POLES Macro-economy - POLES Production system and representation of economic sectors - POLES Energy - POLES Energy resource endowments - POLES Fossil energy resources - POLES Uranium and other fissile resources - POLES Bioenergy - POLES Non-biomass renewables - POLES Energy conversion - POLES Electricity - POLES Heat - POLES Gaseous fuels - POLES Liquid fuels - POLES Solid fuels - POLES Grid, pipelines and other infrastructure - POLES Energy end-use - POLES Transport - POLES Residential and commercial sectors - POLES Industrial sector - POLES Other end-use - POLES Energy demand - POLES Technological change in energy - POLES Land-use - POLES Emissions - POLES Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) options - POLES Climate - POLES Non-climate sustainability dimension - POLES Appendices - POLES Data - POLES References - POLES
Corresponding documentation
AIM-Hub BLUES C3IAM COFFEE-TEA DNE21+ GCAM GEM-E3 GRACE IFs IMACLIM IMAGE MESSAGE-GLOBIOM POLES PROMETHEUS REMIND-MAgPIE TIAM-UCL WITCH
Previous versions
Archive of POLES version ADVANCE
Model information
Model link	http://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/poles https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/poles-jrc-model-documentation-0
Institution	JRC - Joint Research Centre - European Commission (EC-JRC), Belgium, http://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/.
Solution concept	Partial equilibrium (price elastic demand)
Solution method	SimulationRecursive simulation
Anticipation	Myopic

The electricity system consists on 3 main parts:

Demand load curve

The load curve is derived form sectoral electricity demand (depending on the type of use), net trade and losses. POLES considers 2 typical days (winter and summer), each split into 12 time arrays of 2 hours each. A demand load curve is derived for each sector and each country along these 24 time blocks (2 days * 12 periods).

Production

The electricity production system involves different power generation systems:

1. Decentralised production (decentralised PV, autoproduction, ..), that may depend on the days / hour.

1. Centralised production, that need to fill the difference between total demand and decentralised production. The model considers various degree of flexibility of the production means, and thus different abilities to meet the peak / base load curves. Three types of technologies are defined: intermittent sources (wind and solar w/o storage), must-run source (nuclear and some hydro, with little ability to adapt), merit order sources (fossil fuels and biomass as well as some hydro, with higher ability to adapt). Based on these load curve constraints, production depends on variable production costs (efficiency and fuel cost, including addition taxes or financial support schemes).

Capacity planning

The planning of new capacities needs to adress expected future electricity needs while considering the upcoming decomissioning of existing plants. The model calculates theoretical technnology market shares for various duration blocks (730h to 8760h), from total production cost by duration block and infrastructure (/ reality) coefficients that are calibrated to replicate historical technology mix. The development of new capacities depend on these theoretical market shares, development, resource constraints and identified "new" needs (net of decomissioned plants).
Total production cost is the sum of fixed cost (investment, lifetime, discount rate, fixed OM) and variable cost (fuel cost, efficiency, variable O&M), including further taxes or financial support schemes. Investment costs evolve with learning functions (exogenous, endogenous 1 factor, endogenous 2 factors), efficiency evolves exogenously, other parameters can be differentiated by country and technology, fuel costs are derived from endogenous fuel prices and assumptions on taxation policies.

Figure 1. Electricity production technologies in POLES.

In addition to the technologies mentioned in Figure 1, one POLES version includes a further details of biomass technologies in the EU, based on work with the GREEN-X model.

Electricity prices

Finally the POLES model calculates electricity prices from system production cost for base load (used to set the price for industry) and peak load (used to set the price for residential-services-transport).

Information sources include: Enerdata, Eurostat, IEA, ENTSO-E, ETDB