Climate change impacts on the power generation potential of a European mid-century wind farms scenario

Abstract

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.

Changes in terrestrial near-surface wind speed and their possible causes: an overview

“…Therefore, a rapid increase in wind power has been predicted in many countries and regions Lu et al 2009;Pryor and Barthelmie 2010;Greene et al 2012;Tobin et al 2015Tobin et al , 2016. Changes in the SWS can influence the distribution of wind energy.…”

More homogeneous wind conditions under strong climate change decrease the potential for inter-state balancing of electricity in Europe

“…Large backup facilities are needed to guarantee a stable supply of electricity during periods of low wind and solar power generation . Furthermore, climate change affects the demand for electric power (Auffhammer et al, 2017) as well as the operation conditions for thermoelectric and hydroelectric power plants which serve as backup (van Vliet et al, 2016(van Vliet et al, , 2012. However, feedback effects of largescale wind fleets on atmospheric flows are limited .…”

“…In line with the Paris Agreement, the scientific community is increasingly interested in differentiating climate impacts at 1.5 and 2 • C (Schleussner et al, 2016a;James et al, 2017) and the IPCC is currently preparing a special report on 1.5 • C. However, many low-carbon pathways rely on negative emissions during the second half of this century van Vuuren et al, 2016), although their feasibility at scale remains debated (Anderson and Peters, 2016). Future emissions from existing CO 2 -emitting infrastructure (Davis et al, 2010) and current political developments in the US (Trump, 2017), among other things, might impede fast decarbonization.…”

Regional Climate Projections

“…Both hydropower and thermoelectric generation could be at risk with climate change (van Vliet et al 2016). In Europe, climate change may be expected to induce rather general decreases in wind power (Tobin et al 2016), with a higher and more significant signal in Southern Europe (see Fig. 10.3, drawn from the results of the FP7 IMPACT2C project, WP6).…”