Quantifying the impacts of policies on compensating for the hard-to-abate emissions of a smart energy city

Frontrunner cities have adopted strict climate targets and evaluate a fifth of emissions to be hard-to-abate, requiring compensation for these emissions to reach carbon neutrality. Previous research on smart energy systems has largely neglected this need in local-level analyses. The present article addresses this gap by applying bottom-up energy system modeling in the case of the city of Tampere, Finland. The results quantify trade-offs between the need for transmission line expansion, electricity import, biomass consumption, and the ability to compensate for emissions with bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS) when reaching carbon neutrality. This research finds that the use of an existing biomass-based combined heat and power (bio-CHP) plant with BECCS is limited by the demand for district heating (DH), challenged by individual heat pumps (HPs) and waste heat from the electrofuel production process. However, it is possible to simultaneously maintain some degree of bio-CHP and BECCS in combination with electrofuel production. Additionally, wind power deployment lowers total system cost across scenarios. In this way the city can not only serve abatement goals but also resilience and energy security objectives by virtue of the domestic, renewable-based qualities of biomass, wind and electrofuels. In this way, the city can contribute to policy coherence on the national and EU levels where all these goals are expected to be combined. It is feasible to expect that several European cities can make similar choices.