Modeling all alternative solutions for highly renewable energy systems

As the world is transitioning towards highly renewable energy systems, advanced tools are needed to analyze the complex energy networks. Energy system design is, however, challenged by real-world objective functions consisting of a blurry mix of technical and socioeconomic agendas, with limitations that cannot always be clearly stated. As a result, economically suboptimal solutions will likely be preferable. Here, a method capable of determining the continuum containing all economically near-optimal solutions is presented, moving the field of energy system modeling from discrete solutions to a new era where continuous solution ranges are available. The proposed method is applied to study a range of technical and socioeconomic metrics on a model of the European electricity system. The near-optimal region is found to be relatively flat allowing for solutions that are slightly more expensive than the optimum but better in terms of equality, land use, and implementation time.