Recent Tools and Their Roles Towards High-Share Renewable Energy in the Climate-Changing World

With the growing presence of distributed renewable energy (RE) resources needed to decarbonise the high contributions of emissions from the dominant fossil fuel utilisation, there is an ongoing demand to assess and improve the planning and development towards increasing the share of renewable energy utilisation. The transition to a high-share renewable energy future requires robust planning and development strategies. This work explores the emerging suite of new tools that are crucial for navigating this transition, particularly in the context of long-term planning tools that can handle the complexities of climate indices and variable renewable energy (VRE) sources. These tools include the Global Atlas by IRENA, Universal Integrated Energy Planning (UIEP) by SE4All, 100% RE Atlas, IEA Energy-Climate Tool, LUT ESM, WILLIAMS MEDEAS, EN-ROADS/C-ROADS by Climate Interactive and Energy Policy Tracker, which play a vital role in informing policy decisions and setting national renewable energy targets in line with climate change indices. It emphasises the need for tools that can handle increasing data volumes and the continuous development of new modelling solutions. Furthermore, the study presents and compares the results from the utilisation of five of these tools, acknowledging the differences in scenarios from each of the models. It suggests a strategic approach needed to plan towards reaching high-share RE with the use of these tools. By exploring these emerging tools, informed decision-making that paves the way for successful high-share renewable energy development could be enhanced.