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Wind power is expected to play a crucial role in future net-zero energy systems, but wind power simulations to support deployment strategies vary drastically in their results, hindering reliable design decisions. Therefore, we present a transparent, open source, validated and evaluated, global wind power simulation tool ETHOS.RESKit.Wind with high spatial resolution and customizable designs for both onshore and offshore wind turbines. The tool provides a comprehensive validation and calibration procedure using over 16 million global measurements from metrerological masts and wind turbine sites. We achieve a global average capacity factor mean error of 0.006 and Pearson correlation of 0.865. In addition, we evaluate its performance against several aggregated and statistical sources of wind power generation. The release of ETHOS.RESKit.Wind is a step towards a fully open source and open data approach to accurate wind power modeling by incorporating the most comprehensive simulation advances in one model., Comment: Edgar Ubaldo Pe\~na-S\'anchez, Philipp Dunkel and Christoph Winkler contributed euqally to the paper. Main article: 20 pages, 7 figures; supplementary material: 20 pages, 10 figures. This version includes minor updates: Fix appearance of toolname in online abstract. Fix figure numbering in appendix

Rooftop photovoltaic (RTPV) systems are essential for building a decarbonized and, due to its decentralized structure, more resilient energy system, and are particularly important for Ukraine, where recent conflicts have damaged more than half of its electricity and heat supply capacity. Favorable solar irradiation conditions make Ukraine a strong candidate for large-scale PV deployment, but effective policy requires detailed data on spatial and temporal generation potential. This study fills the data gap by using open-source satellite building footprint data corrected with high-resolution data from eastern Germany. This approach allowed accurate estimates of rooftop area and PV capacity and generation across Ukraine, with simulations revealing a capacity potential of 238.8 GW and a generation potential of 290 TWh/a excluding north-facing. The majority of this potential is located in oblasts (provinces) across the country with large cities such as Donetsk, Dnipro or Kyiv and surroundings. These results, validated against previous studies and available as open data, confirm Ukraine's significant potential for RTPV, supporting both energy resilience and climate goals., Comment: Christoph Winkler, Kristina Dabrock, and Serhiy Kapustyan contributed equally to this work. Main article: 18 pages, 8 figures; supplementary material: 13 pages 5 figures. This version includes minor updates: the data availability section has been revised with a new URL, and small corrections have been made to the validation section

Automated driving can have a huge impact on the transport system in passenger, as well as freight applications; however, market and technological development are difficult to foresee. Therefore, a systems analysis is called for to answer the question: What is the impact of automated driving on the techno-economic performance of transport systems? It is important to quantify the potential impacts not only on a local scale and for specific use cases but for entire transport systems at large. Here, we provide an overview of the current state of automated driving, including academic research in addition to industrial development. For industrial development, we find that it will take at least until 2030-2040 for automated vehicles to be widely available for passenger transport. For freight transport on the other hand, automated vehicles might already be used within the next years at least on motorways. For academic research, we find that most studies on passenger transport consider shared automated vehicles separated from other transport modes and consider specific regions only. For freight transport we find that operational strategies and usage potentials for level 4 and 5 trucks lack alignment with real-life use cases and driving profiles. Based on this, we develop an analytical framework for future research. This includes a mode choice model for passenger transport demand calculations, a total cost of ownership model for freight trucks, transport statistics for freight flows, a microscopic traffic simulation to assess the impact of automated vehicles on traffic flow, and a road network analysis.

For fast-tracking climate change response, green hydrogen is key for achieving greenhouse gas neutral energy systems. Especially Sub-Saharan Africa can benefit from it enabling an increased access to clean energy through utilizing its beneficial conditions for renewable energies. However, developing green hydrogen strategies for Sub-Saharan Africa requires highly detailed and consistent information ranging from technical, environmental, economic, and social dimensions, which is currently lacking in literature. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive novel approach embedding the required range of disciplines to analyze green hydrogen cost-potentials in Sub-Saharan Africa. This approach stretches from a dedicated land eligibility based on local preferences, a location specific renewable energy simulation, locally derived sustainable groundwater limitations under climate change, an optimization of local hydrogen energy systems, and a socio-economic indicator-based impact analysis. The capability of the approach is shown for case study regions in Sub-Saharan Africa highlighting the need for a unified, interdisciplinary approach.

Decarbonizing the global energy system requires significant expansions of renewable energy technologies. Given that cost-effective renewable sources are not necessarily situated in proximity to the largest energy demand centers globally, the maritime transportation of low-carbon energy carriers, such as renewable-based hydrogen or ammonia, will be needed. However, whether existent shipyards possess the required capacity to provide the necessary global fleet has not yet been answered. Therefore, this study estimates global tanker demand based on projections for global hydrogen demand, while comparing these projections with historic shipyard production. Our findings reveal a potential bottleneck until 2033-2039 if relying on liquefied hydrogen exclusively. This bottleneck could be circumvented by increasing local hydrogen production, utilizing pipelines, or liquefied ammonia as an energy carrier for hydrogen. Furthermore, the regional concentration of shipyard locations raises concerns about diversification. Increasing demand for container vessels could substantially hinder the scale-up of maritime hydrogen transport., Comment: Number of pages:26 + 4 pages Appendix; Number of figures: 10

Lithium is a critical material for the energy transition, but conventional procurement methods have significant environmental impacts. In this study, we utilize regional energy system optimizations to investigate the techno-economic potential of the low-carbon alternative of direct lithium extraction in deep geothermal plants. We show that geothermal plants will become cost-competitive in conjunction with lithium extraction, even under unfavorable conditions and partially displace photovoltaics, wind power, and storage from energy systems. Our analysis indicates that if 10% of municipalities in the Upper Rhine Graben area in Germany constructed deep geothermal plants, they could provide enough lithium to produce about 1.2 million electric vehicle battery packs per year, equivalent to 70% of today`s annual electric vehicle registrations in the European Union. This approach could offer significant environmental benefits and has high potential for mass application also in other countries, such as the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Italy, highlighting the importance of further research and development of this technology.

Green hydrogen is expected to be traded globally in future greenhouse gas neutral energy systems. However, there is still a lack of temporally- and spatially-explicit cost-potentials for green hydrogen considering the full process chain, which are necessary for creating effective global strategies. Therefore, this study provides such detailed cost-potential-curves for 28 selected countries worldwide until 2050, using an optimizing energy systems approach based on open-field photovoltaics (PV) and onshore wind. The results reveal huge hydrogen potentials (>1,500 PWhLHV/a) and 79 PWhLHV/a at costs below 2.30 EUR/kg in 2050, dominated by solar-rich countries in Africa and the Middle East. Decentralized PV-based hydrogen production, even in wind-rich countries, is always preferred. Supplying sustainable water for hydrogen production is needed while having minor impact on hydrogen cost. Additional costs for imports from democratic regions are only total 7% higher. Hence, such regions could boost the geostrategic security of supply for greenhouse gas neutral energy systems., Comment: in press

Recent global events emphasize the importance of a reliable energy supply. One way to increase energy supply security is through decentralized off-grid renewable energy systems, for which a growing number of case studies are researched. This review gives a global overview of the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for these autonomous energy systems, which range from 0.03 \$_{2021}/kWh to over 1.00 \$_{2021}/kWh worldwide. The average LCOEs for 100% renewable energy systems have decreased by 9% annually between 2016 and 2021 from 0.54 \$_{2021}/kWh to 0.29 \$_{2021}/kWh, presumably due to cost reductions in renewable energy and storage technologies. Furthermore, we identify and discuss seven key reasons why LCOEs are frequently overestimated or underestimated in literature, and how this can be prevented in the future. Our overview can be employed to verify findings on off-grid systems, to assess where these systems might be deployed and how costs evolve.