Robust Investment Strategies for the Norwegian Power System in the Energy Transition?

The energy transition requires fundamental changes in society and all parts of the energy system. Understanding these changes can be possible by consistent analyses with various specialized modelling tools. This paper concerns the bidirectional linking of energy and power system models for analyses of renewable energy systems reliant on reservoir hydropower. The energy system model IFE-TIMES-Norway is soft-linked with the hydro-thermal power market model FanSi to analyse the Norwegian energy system towards 2050. The power market model is used to evaluate the operational robustness of the investment strategies from the energy system model. We use socio-technical pathways as a basis to do techno-economic analyses at different levels of the energy system. The main aim is to understand and discuss the income potential of power generation and storage technologies, and the valuation of the operational flexibility of hydropower and other flexible resources in the two models.