A spatial resolution in four levels for a techno-economic municipal energy system model

The energetic optimisation of a municipality or region requires energy system models which, besides offering a high temporal resolution, go beyond single buildings or building blocks to embrace the complexity of the system as a whole. Since the optimisation can be significantly affected by spacial effects, a spatial resolution is an important feature of such a model. This article presents a techno-economic energy system model with a spatial resolution in four hierarchic levels. The approach is applied to a real use case, comparing the system with and without spatial resolution. The results show that the taken approach is valid, being able to incorporate spatial effects. They also validate qualitatively the expected deviations between the spatially resolved and the model without spatial differentiation.