Changes proposed in this Pull Request

I wanted to update existing renewable capacities to 2023 values recently made available by IRENA. But there seems to be some duplicated effort on this front within the PyPSA umbrella: powerplantmatching has information of renewable capacities from IRENA, and the same data is downloaded through a separate path in retrieve_irena.py.

As nice of an improvement #756 is, I would propose cutting out retrieve_irena.py altogether and using the IRENA data retrieved by powerplantmatching directly. This is implemented in the current PR, achieving the same functionality as before with much less code all in all.

To avoid a regression in terms of data for recent years, this PR should only be merged once PyPSA/powerplantmatching#157 is merged, and then should be combined with a version bump of the powerplantmatching dependency.

In the future, data on existing renewable capacities can be updated simply by updating powerplantmatching and bumping the version in pypsa-eur. This will then transparently filter through to both places where existing renewable capacities are added to network in pypsa-eur, namely in add_electricity.py and in add_existing_baseyear.py. Having these two scripts depend on different sources for the same data seems like a source of confusion and potential problems.

Checklist

• I tested my contribution locally and it seems to work fine.
• Code and workflow changes are sufficiently documented.
• Changed dependencies are added to envs/environment.yaml.
• Changes in configuration options are added in all of config.default.yaml.
• Changes in configuration options are also documented in doc/configtables/*.csv.
• A release note doc/release_notes.rst is added.