Impact of Climate Change on Combined Solar and Run-of-River Power in Northern Italy

Abstract

Moving towards energy systems with high variable renewable energy shares requires a good understanding of the impacts of climate change on the energy penetration. To do so, most prior impact studies have considered climate projections available from Global Circulation Models (GCMs). Other studies apply sensitivity analyses on the climate variables that drive the system behavior to inform how much the system changes due to climate change. In the present work, we apply the Decision Scaling approach, a framework merging these two approaches, for analyzing a renewables-only scenario for the electric system of Northern Italy where the main renewable sources are solar and hydropower. Decision Scaling explores the system sensibility to a range of future plausible climate states. GCM projections are considered to estimate probabilities of the future climate states. We focus on the likely future energy mix within the region (25% of solar photovoltaic and 75% of hydropower). We also carry out a sensitivity analysis according to the storage capacity. The results show that run-of-the river power generation from this Alpine area is expected to increase although the average inflow decreases under climate change. They also show that the penetration rate is expected to increase for systems with storage capacity less than one month of average load and inversely for higher storage capacity.

The future of Alpine Run-of-River hydropower production: climate change, environmental flow requirements and technical production potential

“…It is noteworthy that the optimisation of the design discharge corresponds only to a single factor in terms of technical efficiency increase and ultimately in terms of production increase. Future work should focus on further technical optimisation potential, considering operational run-of-river power plant data.The present study confirms the climate change trends of previous streamflow studies in the Alps[2,[8][9][10], i.e. increased winter production and decreased annual production.…”

“…In the context of climate change and in Alpine countries, where climate change is particularly strong, there was a very high focus on accumulation production, because the significant changes of snow and glacier. But there are very few studies on RoR [5][6][7][8][9][10][11] and say that despite the majority of decreasing streamflows, annual production can increase.…”

Complementarity between Combined Heat and Power Systems, Solar PV and Hydropower at a District Level: Sensitivity to Climate Characteristics along an Alpine Transect

“…Third, we use perfect foresight assumption for operating the electrical storage capacity. These assumptions have been broadly used on the complementarity literature (e.g., [13][14][15]19,38,48,53,62,63]) and none is expected to significantly influence the assessment of the sensitivity of the complementarity between CHP and solar PV/RoR hydropower described in this study. A fourth assumption/configuration used in this study concerns the relatively large, although limited, flexibility of the CHP electricity generation.…”

“…The conventional operation strategy above-described is sometimes denoted as 'maximizing self-consumption strategy' [51]; other strategies exist such as the peak shaving strategy (see [52] for a comparison of different operating strategies). Note that operation of the storage capacity makes use of perfect foresight [53,54], which may lead to optimistic results compared to cases where uncertainty in weather and demand forecasts are accounted for (e.g., [55,56]), although the main conclusions of the study are expected to hold. More advanced storage models also exist and allow to better account for the physical constraints of the electrical storage, such as the decay in performance with aging (e.g., [57][58][59]).…”

The use of photovoltaics and electric vehicles for electricity peak shaving in office buildings

“…The energy yield from PVs has been calculated based on a formula which takes into account the impact of module operating temperature on the efficiency, used inter alia by [7]. In the given location, 1 kW installed capacity in PVs will deliver around 986 kWh of electricity per annum, which translates into a capacity factor equal to 11.2%.…”