Meteorological and climatic potentials and limits of a proliferation of renewable energies.

Summary Greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for the global warming observed in recent decades. It is therefore essential today to decarbonize our way of life, the energy sector and especially electricity production. Renewable energies such as wind and photovoltaic have developed strongly in recent years. These energy sources present a major constraint to their development: they are intermittent and cannot be controlled to balance demand. In this doctoral work, the onshore wind and photovoltaic productions were modeled and corrected according to a homogeneous distribution across France and Europe between 1979 and 2015 according to the ERA-interim reanalyses. In a second step, a simplified model of balance between renewable supply and French demand (MSEOD) was developed and applied to the period of ERA-interim reanalyses from 1979 to 2015. This model aims at exploring the potential and the limits of a renewable energy mix depending on whether the cost of electricity or the volume of stored energy is optimized.We have shown that minimizing the cost of electricity (between 186 and 194 e/MWh depending on the scenario) leads to a small overproduction (between 10 and 20%) with significant storage resources (power and volume of stored energy - between 20 and 81 hours of the average French consumption), while the choice of minimizing the maximum volume of stored energy leads to a large overproduction (between 164 and 199%) generating a cost of electricity approximately twice as high (between 373 and 488 e/MWh). In spite of a high overproduction (close to 200% of the average consumption), it is always necessary to have an additional power (de-storage and thermal production) higher than the average consumption to allow the balancing of the demand during certain meteorological events dimensioning the system. The absence of grid constraints on imported power allows the maximum volume of stored energy to be reduced by a factor of 10 compared to the case of a self-sufficient France. The additional power, necessary to balance the French demand, is only marginally reduced. This work has shown that some meteorological events lead to a very low renewable production on the scale of the European continent. The optimal technology mix is strongly wind-based, with between 68% and 100% of intermittent renewable generation from wind depending on the scenarios and LCOEs tested. The use of lower electricity production costs (60 e/MWh for photovoltaic and 65 e/MWh for wind), leads to an electricity cost of around 100 e/MWh for a maximum volume of storage corresponding to one day of average consumption.