The 10 most promising remote renewable energy hubs

Authors: Victor Dachet, Damien Ernst and Thibaut Techy

Access the presentation: https://hdl.handle.net/2268/337186

Energy consumption is not evenly distributed across the world. It is concentrated in specific regions referred as load centers.

In Europe, the Blue Banana is one of the major load centers. It stretches from northern Italy to southern England.

Load centers are not only the main hubs of energy demand, particularly for electricity.
In the near future, they will also become the areas where e-fuel demand is the highest.

E-fuels are produced from low-carbon electricity. They include:

• e-molecules such as e-hydrogen (H₂), e-ammonia (NH₃), e-methane (CH₄), and e-methanol (CH₃OH);
• synthetic fuels such as e-gasoline and e-SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuel).

From a physico-chemical standpoint, these e-fuels are identical to their conventional fossil-based counterparts; only the production process differs.

E-hydrogen and the e-fuels derived from it are expected to become key energy carriers for decarbonizing uses and sectors that lack credible low-carbon alternatives. However, the demand from major load centers worldwide cannot be met solely with their local renewable resources, which are limited in both quality and available land for new installations.

One solution is to produce low-carbon electricity and e-fuels in remote regions of the world with abundant renewable resources.

These are known as Remote Renewable Energy Hubs (RREHs).

What makes a region a good candidate for hosting a Remote Renewable Energy Hub?

The first requirement is to have abundant renewable resources to produce a sufficient amount of e-fuels.

This defines our first criterion: C1 – Renewable potential.

But this is not the only aspect to consider. To fully assess the relevance of a region, we also take into account four additional criteria:

C2 – Land availability;

C3 – Existing infrastructure;

C4 – Financing conditions and competitiveness;

C5 – Energy sovereignty.

Together, these five criteria form the analytical framework that will allow us to compare the regions studied.

This presentation offers a travel through ten regions of the world that, at first glance, show interesting potential for the development of RREHs.

Each region will be assessed according to the five criteria introduced earlier, taking the Blue Banana as the reference load center.

Throughout this journey, we will combine historical insights, technical analysis, and economic perspectives to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each region.

Discover the 10 best hubs in this presentation : https://hdl.handle.net/2268/337186