Battery electric trucks (BETs) are becoming cost-competitive, yet adoption by fleet operators across Europe remains limited. A key reason is that BET procurement is not a simple vehicle replacement. It changes the wider decision-making context of the fleet operator, requiring alignment between the vehicle, charging infrastructure, grid capacity, routes, customers, contracts, and daily operations. Existing research identifies many adoption barriers and drivers and studies individual electrification issues such as charging, routing, and grid capacity. However, it does not connect these factors to concrete procurement decisions, nor does it treat BET procurement as an interdependent decision-making process from the fleet operator perspective.

This thesis develops a multi-level decision-support framework that helps fleet operators structure BET procurement. The central research question asks how such a framework can guide fleet operators in structuring the interdependent strategic, tactical, and operational decisions of BET implementation across transport profiles, while accounting for adoption barriers and drivers. The study combines a literature review of academic and grey sources, conceptual modelling, and eighteen semi-structured expert interviews conducted in two rounds. Interview data were analysed through deductive and inductive coding, and the interdependencies between decisions were mapped in a directed relationship matrix.

The central finding is that BET procurement is an organisational decision-making problem rather than a vehicle-replacement decision. It introduces fifteen interdependent decisions across the strategic, tactical, and operational levels, three of which emerged only from practice. Charging-related decisions shape many of the others. Adoption barriers and drivers do not act as stand-alone factors but operate through specific decisions, and feasibility is determined by seven operational transport dimensions rather than by broad transport profiles alone. The resulting framework starts with these dimensions as a feasibility check, structures the decisions across three levels, and uses operational experience as a feedback mechanism, turning a vague electrification ambition into a phased, context-specific pathway. The framework is an analytical structuring tool that is grounded in practice but not yet validated in a real procurement process. ... Read more

To decarbonise the Dutch electricity system, offshore wind capacity is expected to expand substantially in the coming decades. This creates both a spatial mismatch between offshore generation and onshore demand and a temporal mismatch between variable wind output and electricity demand. Storage is widely proposed to help address these mismatches, and offshore storage in particular could relieve pressure on export cables and landing points by acting upstream of this infrastructure. Offshore storage is, however, more expensive than onshore storage, and earlier studies, mostly conducted at the level of a single wind park, disagree on whether it is worthwhile. Project-level studies assess offshore storage in isolation, without endogenous competition against the full set of alternative responses available to the system, while system-level models usually lack spatial detail in the offshore–onshore infrastructure chain. This thesis identifies the system conditions under which offshore electricity storage reduces total system cost in the 2040 Dutch power system with high offshore wind capacity.

The analysis uses a spatially resolved, cost-minimising optimisation model in Calliope, in which storage, generation, transmission, and selected offshore infrastructure compete endogenously. The offshore–onshore chain is represented explicitly, including offshore wind hubs, export cables, and landing points. Three conditions identified from the literature are varied in a structured scenario design: offshore wind capacity (30–45 GW), near-landing onshore storage availability, and the offshore storage cost premium (0–75%). Each of the 27 scenarios is run with offshore storage enabled and disabled, isolating its system-level contribution across 54 model runs.

The results show that under baseline assumptions offshore storage is selected mainly when the cost premium is low (at or below roughly 25%) and offshore wind capacity is high (around 37.5 GW or more), concentrating at the hubs where wind can be overplanted relative to export cable capacity. The availability of landing point storage has little effect. Allocation ranges from negligible to about 112 GWh at the highest wind level and zero premium. Where allocation is largest, offshore storage produces a robust but modest system cost saving of up to about 78–79 M€/yr (0.3% of total system cost), substituting for onshore storage, reducing offshore wind curtailment, and, at the highest wind level, displacing export cable expansion and gas-fired dispatch and lowering CO2 emissions by around 2–2.5%. These patterns persist across a range of robustness checks. Offshore storage is therefore best understood as a conditional upstream response whose value arises from co-optimisation with offshore wind overplanting and export cable sizing. ... Read more

Indonesia’s energy transition is hindered by persistent structural challenges rooted in the contractual design of Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs). These long-term contracts, often including take-or-pay clauses and capacity payments, financially bind the state-owned utility PLN to coal-fired generation. Despite official decarbonization targets, coal continues to dominate the power mix, exceeding 60%, resulting in electricity oversupply and fiscal strain. Current regulations and incentive structures remain insufficient to accelerate the coal phase-out.

This thesis investigates the systemic impact of coal PPAs on Indonesia’s decarbonization pathway, particularly in the context of early termination policies and financial instruments such as the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP). A System Dynamics (SD) model is developed to simulate the interplay of contractual lock-in, procurement logic, and financial levers over time. The model structure is informed by stakeholder interviews and validated through historical calibration, sensitivity testing, and scenario analysis.

Results indicate that coal dependency is structurally reinforced unless both upstream and downstream barriers are addressed. In the Base Case, installed coal capacity rises from 5.6 GW in 2015 to over 227 GW by 2060. Policy interventions such as a modest carbon price (2.02 USD/tCO₂) or targeted JETP funding alone achieve only limited reductions—capacity remains at 180 GW under Scenario E04. A complete coal phase-out by 2040 is only achieved when a strict procurement moratorium is combined with sufficient transition funding, leading to the retirement of over 70 GW of coal capacity and a 100% reduction in coal-based electricity generation compared to the base scenario.

The novelty of this study lies in its integration of contractual, institutional, and financial dynamics into a unified feedback-based simulation framework. It is the first study to quantify how coal PPAs interact with policy and finance to sustain or disrupt coal lock-in. The model explicitly captures mechanisms often overlooked in static assessments, offering policymakers a dynamic tool to explore intervention strategies and system leverage points.

While the model simplifies the technology mix to a coal–solar binary and assumes idealized funding flows, it offers valuable insights into PPAs as systemic anchors. Key limitations include the exclusion of strategic stakeholder behavior, spatial heterogeneity in grid capacity and demand, and detailed grid operational constraints. Addressing these limitations in future research could improve the realism and applicability of the model. In particular, expanding the model to incorporate energy choice heterogeneity, agent-based negotiation dynamics, and integration with power system adequacy or dispatch models would allow for a more comprehensive understanding of political feasibility, grid reliability, and transition costs.

This research contributes a transferable simulation tool and strategic policy insights for countries confronting similar PPA-induced lock-ins. It highlights the need for coordinated structural reform, regulatory realignment, and targeted finance to enable a just and timely coal transition. ... Read more

The urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has placed significant pressure on municipalities to decarbonise the residential heating sector, a major contributor to energy consumption and emissions. Municipalities face the complex challenge of navigating numerous factors to implement sustainable heating solutions that are technically feasible, economically viable, environmentally friendly, and socially accepted. This thesis addresses this challenge by developing a multidimensional assessment framework and decision-making support tool that acts as a compass, guiding municipalities toward tailored, neighbourhood-specific heat transition strategies. The framework integrates spatial, technical, economic, environmental, social, and regulatory factors to assess and compare sustainable heating technologies at both household and neighbourhood levels.

The primary objective of this research is to determine how sustainable residential heating solutions can be assessed using a multidimensional framework to develop tailored, neighbourhood-specific heat transition strategies for both households and municipalities... ... Read more