Planning the future European power system

It is the declared political objective of the European Union and their member countries to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the future. Those targets are from a today's perspective very ambitious making an extensive restructuring of the electric power system necessary. Concerning this restructuration not a single but multiple paths are possible and therefore the decisive question is which path to follow. Scientific valuating the impact of future designs and technologies are therefore advantageous and can be used by policy makers to set incentives to enforce the optimal path. The presented paper deals with this question by analyzing the optimal mix of generation units and transmission capacities for the EU in the year 2050 under different political frameworks and economical boundaries. The results show how Europe's energy demand of electricity can be met economically under the constraints of carbon reduction and in function of different political and technical boundaries.