Planning Europe's Energy Infrastructure under Uncertainty

About the workshop

Europe must plan grids, industry and energy supply for decades ahead without knowing future fuel prices, technology costs or how fast new infrastructure gets built. RESILIENT has developed open-source tools and methods to address this uncertainty. We applied them in research papers and case studies, taught them in workshops and training events, and contributed them to the open-source PyPSA ecosystem.

At this final workshop, we share what we have learned: the project's main findings, case studies from Germany, Finland and France, and the open data and tools anyone can reuse. A panel weighs the costs and benefits of reducing Europe's dependence on gas imports.

Programme

1. 09:00

   Arrival, coffee and croissants

2. 09:30

   Welcome: why RESILIENT, why now?

   Tom Brown, TU Berlin

3. 09:40

   RESILIENT: what we have built and what we have learned

   Iegor Riepin, TU Berlin

   Project summary, main findings and reusable outputs.

4. 10:00

   Research I: European energy planning under uncertainty

   • Diversity of biomass usage pathways to achieve emissions targets in the European energy system

     Markus Millinger, RISE · Nature Energy, 2025

   • The role of Projects of Common Interest in reaching Europe's energy policy targets

     Bobby Xiong, TU Berlin · Environmental Research Letters, 2026

   • Accelerating fossil gas independence in Europe

     Lukas Franken, TU Berlin · arXiv, 2026

5. 10:45

   Panel: Less gas, less risk? Energy independence and the price of resilience

   Bringing together research, policy and grid-planning perspectives, this panel discusses the costs and benefits of reducing Europe's gas-import dependence. What is the price of greater independence, and how should it be weighed against exposure to future gas-price shocks? What would it take to electrify industrial heat, and how can grids, flexibility and backup capacity support that transition? Could gas still shape electricity prices even as consumption falls? And who should bear the costs? Audience questions welcome.

6. 11:30

   Coffee and networking

7. 12:00

   Case studies: industry, carbon and e-fuels

   Four case studies from RESILIENT partners.

   • Case study North Rhine-Westphalia

     IN4climate.NRW, Fraunhofer ISI and TU Berlin · NRW workshop slides, 2026

   • Case study Baden-Württemberg

     TransnetBW · CEMENT, 2026

   • Case study Finland

     LUT

   • Case study France

     EDF

8. 12:45

   Coffee and networking

9. 13:00

   Research II: from results to reuse: open tools, data and faster optimisation

   • Modelling the high-voltage grid using open data for Europe and beyond

     Bobby Xiong, TU Berlin · Nature Scientific Data, 2025
     Plus a preview of ongoing grid-builder work.

   • PyPSA and SMS++: decomposition, benchmarks and how to use the tool

     University of Pisa · Deliverable D2.1, 2026

   • Co-optimising steel transformation and the European energy system: An age- and site-resolved representation of iron and steel in PyPSA-Eur

     Khaled Al-Dabbas, Fraunhofer ISI · SSRN, 2026

10. 13:45

    What comes next? Takeaways and closing

    Tom Brown and Iegor Riepin, TU Berlin

    Project takeaways, access to outputs, next collaboration opportunities and thanks.

11. 14:00

    Snacks, open end Q&A, networking

Venue

Registration

Please register in advance. Places are limited.

Organisers

The workshop is organised by TU Berlin, Fraunhofer ISI and IN4climate.NRW. RESILIENT brings together universities, research institutes and industry partners from five countries and is funded through the Clean Energy Transition Partnership 2022 programme, with the German partners funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE).

Questions? Write to ed.nilreb-ut - ta - nipeir.rogei