This Report presents two new applications of the integrated gas-electric simulator developed by RSE in the 2019-2021 Three-Year Plan, in collaboration with the University of Bergamo. The integrated model is a tool created to represent the growing degree of interdependence between the electricity and gas sectors. It is able to simulate the coordinated operation of the two systems along an entire year with hourly time steps, in order to ensure the satisfaction of electricity and gas demand at the lowest system cost.

This report presents scenario studies carried out with the version of the Integrated Simulator updated in the first year of the Three-Year System Research Plan 2022-2024, through a collaboration established with the Politecnico di Milano, with the aim of introducing the modeling of the satisfaction of the reserve requirements of the electricity system. In particular, an analysis on the coordinated supply of these requirements for different scenarios of the Italian power system to 2030 is described. The impact of increasing involvement of different technologies in providing services to the power system was assessed, with a focus on power-to-hydrogen technology.

The decision to force the system to produce only green hydrogen has resulted in a rather low capacity factor for electrolyzers. In addition, the increasing participation of electrolyzers in the provision of ancillary services has implied, on the one hand, a reduced capacity to contain overgeneration and, on the other hand, a slight attenuation in total system costs.

In addition, the preliminary assessments, carried out in collaboration with the University of Bergamo, necessary to make the main modeling choices with the aim of analyzing European-scale scenarios are presented here. In particular, the following aspects are discussed: definition of the European gas system zones; modeling of gas imports into Europe from exporting countries via pipelines and regasifiers; definition of the intra-EU gas transportation network topology and related transportation tariffs; analysis of public sources (reports, databases, etc.) that can be used to find all input data necessary for modeling the gas system on a European scale.