Planning and operating a renewable-dominated European power system under uncertainty

•Planning the capacity expansion of the European power system towards 2050.•Using stochastic optimization to consider the long- and short-term uncertainties.•Operating the energy and reserve markets of the European power system in 2050.•Huge production of intermittent renewable power is possible with storage capacity.•Sixteen countries will end up with a generating system at least 70% renewable. In this paper we study the European power system for 2050 from both the expansion and the operation perspectives. First, the generating and storage capacity to be built is decided by solving a multi-stage investment model taking into account the uncertainty related to the investment costs and the demand growth. Stochastic programming is used to represent this decision-making problem under uncertainty. Second, the daily operation of the resulting European power system is analyzed. A two-stage stochastic-programming problem is proposed to model the day-ahead energy and reserve markets in the first stage, and the real-time operation in the second stage. At this level, the uncertainty of the hourly available wind and solar power and the demand level is considered. The numerical results indicate that an European power system mainly based on solar and onshore wind power is possible at a reasonable cost if storage units are also installed. The total new generating capacity to be built up to 2050 will be around 881 GW, which leads to an investment cost of at least 1622 billion euros. The possibility of wind, solar and storage units to provide a certain reserve capacity allows to reduce the participation of thermal units. Therefore, a 77% reduction in the CO2 emissions respect to 1990 may be achieved in 2050. Finally, unserved demand is found in few countries only in 75 h of the year, while the average daily energy prices are stable and comparatively low among the countries.