Sub-national TIMES model for analyzing regional future use of Biomass and Biofuels in France and Sweden

In the context of mitigating climate change and increase energy security, the utilization of biomass in the energy sector is expected to play a major role. However, to estimate the possibility of fulfilling national goals concerning the future use of biomass sources and to estimate the future use of biomass sources in the energy sector, the current energy system models needs to be further developed to consider the high sub-national variances in the supply and cost of the biomass sources. In this paper we present a sub-national MARKAL/TIMES model for estimating regional utilization of biomass sources and the future development of the energy system. The proposed model is evaluated for two case studies, France and Sweden, for which the future utilization of biomass is evaluated utilizing numerous scenarios of the potential supply of biomass, cost of biomass, and end-use demand. Our results show that the limit of national biomass potentials for energy purposes in France is approximately 35 Mtoe, while all demand scenarios for Sweden could be fulfilled by national biomass potentials. Furthermore, the results show that there are large differences in the regional utilization level of biomass sources, even when the total utilization level of biomass sources is high.