Ambitious climate change mitigation plans call for a significant increase in the use of renewables, which could, however, make the supply system more vulnerable to climate variability and changes. Here we evaluate climate change impacts on solar photovoltaic (PV) power in Europe using the recent EURO-CORDEX ensemble of high-resolution climate projections together with a PV power production model and assuming a well-developed European PV power fleet. Results indicate that the alteration of solar PV supply by the end of this century compared with the estimations made under current climate conditions should be in the range (−14%;+2%), with the largest decreases in Northern countries. Temporal stability of power generation does not appear as strongly affected in future climate scenarios either, even showing a slight positive trend in Southern countries. Therefore, despite small decreases in production expected in some parts of Europe, climate change is unlikely to threaten the European PV sector.

Wind energy resource is subject to changes in climate. To investigate the impacts of climate change on future European wind power generation potential, we analyze a multi-model ensemble of the most recent EURO-CORDEX regional climate simulations at the 12 km grid resolution. We developed a mid-century wind power plant scenario to focus the impact assessment on relevant locations for future wind power industry. We found that, under two greenhouse gas concentration scenarios, changes in the annual energy yield of the future European wind farms fleet as a whole will remain within ±5% across the 21st century. At country to local scales, wind farm yields will undergo changes up to 15% in magnitude, according to the large majority of models, but smaller than 5% in magnitude for most regions and models. The southern fleets such as the Iberian and Italian fleets are likely to be the most affected. With regard to variability, changes are essentially small or poorly significant from subdaily to interannual time scales.

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