EMPIRE – European Model for Power System Investment with Renewable Energy

EMPIRE is a comprehensive power system model including generation, storage, and transmission capacity expansion. It is designed to determine optimal capacity investments under operational uncertainty, while also incorporating long- and short-term dynamics.To achieve these objectives, EMPIRE is a stochastic linear program endogenously considering uncertainty on an hourly operational resolution of (1) nationally aggregated load and (2) availability of variable renewable supply. The model considers net transfer capacity (NTC) of power exchange between countries, up-ramping constraints for generators and investment and operation of storage technologies.

EMPIRE has three key advantages in contrast to other power sector models. The first is the special handling of challenges given by the variability of renewable technologies, in particular with wind and solar power, which highly impacts the supply and demand balance. Another major contribution of EMPIRE is that it simultaneously incorporates short- and long-term dynamics, in conjunction with short-term uncertainty. Dynamics refer to multiple investment periods coexisting with multiple sequential operational decision periods, while uncertainty is enhanced through multiple input scenarios that captures different operating conditions. Lastly, EMPIRE uses representative time periods (days or weeks) with an houlry resolution within each investment period to preserve computational tractabitlity.