Creating hourly distributions at national level for various energy demands and renewable energy supplies

In the future, intermittent renewables will provide much larger shares of the primary energy supply compared to today, so accommodating their fluctuations is a key challenge for future energy systems. Many researchers use computer modelling to investigate this challenge, by simulating how the energy system will behave with increasing amounts of intermittent renewable energy. To assess this challenge, short-term time steps at an hourly scale are often necessary. Without this, the variations in renewable energy production will be missed, since their production can increase and decrease without being recorded over longer time horizons, for example over one day. In this paper, a methodology is presented for creating hourly distributions for energy systems analysis tools. On the demand side, hourly distributions are developed for electricity, heating, cooling, and transport while the supply side includes wind, solar (photovoltaic and thermal), and wave power. Distributions are not created for dispatchable plants, such as coal, gas, and nuclear thermal plants, since their output is usually determined by the energy modelling tool rather than by a dependent resource. The methodologies are purposely based on generic data sources so it can be utilised for any country. Where possible, the results are compared against existing data. If available, local bottom-up data should be prioritised, but if not, then this methodology offers an estimation of the short-term variations expected.