The electricity system value of the local acceptance of onshore wind in Europe

This is the associated data repository for the paper titled The electricity system value of the local acceptance of onshore wind in Europe, which is currently under review. A preprint of the paper is available on arXiv.  

The full authorlist is: James Price, Guillermo Valenzuela-Venegas, Oskar Vågerö, Marianne Zeyringer, Monika Bucha, Ruihong Chen, Adrienne Etard, Andrea N. Hahmann, Alena Lohrmann, Russell McKenna, Christian Mikovits, Evangelos Panos, Meixi Zhang, Luis Ramirez Camargo

The repository contains the necessary input data to run the highRES-Europe model workflow and replicate the results. 

Datasets

Weather data used in highRES-Europe is based on ERA5 reanalysis data from ECMWF, which is available from 1940 to the present. In this particular application, we use the year 1995. ERA5 reanalysis data is used to generate hourly capacity factor time series for onshore and offshore wind power, solar power and run-of-river hydropower as well as to estimate hourly inflow to hydropower reservoirs. The wind power capacity factors are bias-corrected based on the Global Wind Atlas and are available here. 

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.

• European shapefiles
  • Dataset (Under a general CC BY 4.0 licence, with additional restrictions)
• Corine land cover
  • Dataset and description (Licence: no limitations to public access)
• The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA).

Data used for the social and environmental tolerance scenarios (raster files included in this repository) is a combination of already publicly available datasets (such as the ones listed above) and newly developed European-wide spatially granular datasets from the WIMBY project. A Snakemake based pre-processing workflow to generate these raster files are available on GitHub. Below is a list of the WIMBY datasets and references to where they can be found as well as descriptions of them.

• An assessment of landscape scenicness
  • Description
    Dataset (Under a CC BY 4.0 licence)
• Bird vulnerability to collisions with wind turbines
  • Description 
  • Dataset (Under a CC BY 4.0 licence)
• Pseudo-species richness for threatened bat species,
  • Description and dataset (Under a CC BY 4.0 licence)
• Regulatory setback distances from settlements
  • Description (Forthcoming publication by Bucha et al., A Systematic Classification and Assessment of Financial Participation and Compensation Schemes in the European Wind Energy Sector (2006-2025))
  • Dataset (Under a CC BY 4.0 licence)
•  Shadow flicker from onshore wind turbines
  • Description