Supervisor: Martin Greiner

Often when discussing the advent of renewable energy sources, such as wind or solar power, the discussion will turn to the topic of storage and redistribution during time of surplus generation, and injection from auxiliary power sources during times of scarcity. It would be simple enough to model the to and fro of energy for a couple of households, but on the scale of several Nation-States these calculations are vastly complex.

To simplify these calculations the method of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) can be used.

The part of this method that will be discussed during the colloquia are all based on calculus and linear algebra a physics student that has completed his or her second year might understand.

To exhibit the strengths of PCA, a simplified electricity network of Europe is considered.

To this end the mismatch is introduced as an expression for the difference between the Renewable Energy Generation and the consumption of energy (here denoted as the Load) for a given nation.