The first call of the joint Baltic-Nordic energy research program is funded for three projects, two of which involve the Lithuanian Energy Institute.
First project: Fast, flexible and secure decarbonisation of the Baltic states – possible progress in the next Ten years, FasTen.
The project will analyse the potential evolution of the combined Baltic-Nordic energy system and explore the opportunities for increased interconnections and sector coupling in the Baltic States. Further, the project seeks to explore how regional power grids can be strengthened in order to develop electricity grids strong enough to secure stable electricity flows – which could help decarbonise the Nordic-Baltic countries and possibly parts of central Europe as well. FasTen will use modelling tools to highlight the costs and benefits of this development. Lastly, the project will explore the opportunities of accelerating the decarbonisation of the transport sector, through electric vehicles.
The project owner is VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the project partners are Riga Technical University and Lithuanian Energy Institute. So far, the consortium has had a kick-off and is planning on meetings with relevant stakeholders by the end of June. The project will run until October 2021.
Second project: Integrating energy sufficiency into modelling of sustainable energy scenarios
This project will explore how the Nordic and Baltic countries can develop better and more extensive energy scenarios in the primary cases of Denmark, Latvia and Lithuania.
The project’s objectives are to integrate sufficiency aspects into energy modelling that are being used for development of sustainable energy scenarios. The project seeks to develop modified energy scenarios for the three primary cases, thus emphasize the combination of sufficiency, efficiency, and renewable energy.
While discussing sustainable development scenarios, the supply side is often emphasized, thus this project seeks to also include the demand side in these dialogues. The objectives are to enable a policy dialogue among public and private actors, involving aspects like possibilities and limitations for socio-economic and regulatory changes in moving towards these scenarios.
Aalborg University is the project owner, together with INFORSE Europe (DK), Green Liberty (LV) and Lithuanian Energy Institute as project partners.