highRES-Europe: the high temporal and spatial Resolution Electricity System model for Europe

highRES-Europe is a dataset and instantiation of the highRES modelling framework, which allows a user to run a basic European version of highRES. highRES is built in GAMS, and the entire workflow used for preparing the data and running the model is openly available in a GitHub repository: https://github.com/highRES-model/highRES-Europe-WF. Additional information on how the model and workflow is structured can be found in the documentation (https://highres-europe-wf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).

This particular version of the data is set to run a model that is based on the weather conditions of 2010, which impacts the performance and availability of variable renewable energy sources (wind, solar and hydro) and the demand. Links and instructions of how to acquire weather- and demand data for other years is available in this repository where the data is described. 

Demand data

The underlying demand data is acquired from the interannual demand calculator (https://zenodo.org/records/10820928), which is further processed in highRES-workflow. The data available in the interannual demand calculator ranges from between 1941-2023. 

Note that we have renamed GB to UK in the demand data. 

Weather data

Weather data used in highRES-Europe is based on ERA5 reanalysis data from ECMWF (https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5), which is available from 1940 to present. ERA5 reanalysis data is used to generate hourly capacity factor time series for onshore and offshore wind power, solar power and run-off-river hydropower as well as estimate hourly inflow to hydropower reservoirs. The wind power capacity factors are bias-corrected based on the Global Wind Atlas (https://wimby.eu/resource/d1-1-wind-resources-api/). 

The hydropower time series are further normalised based on historic electricity generation data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/electricity/electricity-generation). 

Existing infrastructure

highRES-Europe runs a partial greenfield optimisation, meaning that some existing electricity system infrastructure is already available and fixed in the model. Existing hydropower capacities and their spatial allocation is acquired from the JRC Hydropower database (https://zenodo.org/records/5215920).

Land availability restrictions and shapefiles

Part of the workflow includes excluding areas from VRE deployment. 

Shapefiles for Europe is acquired from Eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/gisco/geodata/statistical-units/territorial-units-statistics). The main exclusions are based on Corine land cover (https://doi.org/10.2909/960998c1-1870-4e82-8051-6485205ebbac) and WDPA (https://www.protectedplanet.net/en/thematic-areas/wdpa?tab=WDPA).