Impacts of ambitious energy policy pathways (Amber)

Impacts of ambitious energy policy pathways (Amber) project will analyse energy policy pathways for the Baltic countries until 2050. The analysis will consider national and EU energy and climate targets and study cost-effective pathways to meet those targets. The project will model not just the power sector, but also heating, transport, and main energy sources of industries. All these sectors will need to move away from fossil fuels. At the same time, there is lot of wind power and photovoltaic generation being built in the region. The modelling approach can consider the impact of resulting hourly variability and it can also capture the interactions between the energy sectors as well as interactions between Baltic, Nordic, and Central European energy systems.

In the Amber project, the consortium will continue developing an open data set and tools to represent the Baltic energy systems started in the Nordic Energy Research Project FasTen (VTT, LEI, and RTU). The project will improve chosen data gaps and methodological approaches: better representation of the building stock, more granular description of the district heating, generation of electric vehicle time series, main energy sources of industry, and inclusion of life-cycle emissions in the results. The project will be using an open-source energy systems model called Backbone (https://gitlab.vtt.fi/backbone/backbone).

The project will pay attention to the interactions with the stakeholders. We are aiming to make policy relevant analysis for the Baltic states and discuss with policy makers to ensure we are analysing interesting alternatives. This will happen through one-to-one discussions already been started during the FasTen project and through two webinars aimed towards disseminating the results to policy makers and to Baltic and European energy system modelers.

Project acronym: Amber

Funding: 1.743.106 NOK (~172 896 EUR)

Coordinator: VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland (Finland)

Partners:
Riga Technical University (Latvia)
Lithuanian Energy Institute (Lithuania)
Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia)