Abstract for: Renewable energy sources: diversity of impacts, perspectives and challenges

Renewable energy sources are cornerstones to tackling the climate crisis and a fundamental part of the energy transition. Investment costs have significantly declined in the last decades which, together with economic incentives, has led to rapid growth in renewable capacity. The increasing share of renewables in the electricity system creates a number of challenges and uncertainties, such as availability and reliability. Therefore, a number of issues, some of which are unintended, require careful analysis to be fully understood. In this paper, I present a number of applications where system dynamics have been useful to study the diffusion of renewable sources. The cases are i) Effect of renewable in long-term capacity cycles; ii) Effect of renewables on short-term security of supply and economic dispatch; iii). Energy policy assessment to promote the diffusion of renewable sources; and iv) Sustainable energy access in off-grid zones in Colombia. We have extensively used system dynamics, and Microworlds, which have been complemented with experimental economics.