The impact of climate change on a cost-optimal highly renewable European electricity network

Abstract

We use three ensemble members of the EURO-CORDEX project and their data on surface wind speeds, solar irradiation as well as water runoff with a spatial resolution of 12 km and a temporal resolution of 3 hours under representative concentration pathway 8.5 (associated with a strong climate change and a temperature increase of 2.6 to 4.8 • C until the end of the century) until 2100 to investigate the impact of climate change on wind, solar and hydro resources and consequently on a highly renewable and cost-optimal European power system. The weather data is transformed into power, different aspects such as capacity factors and correlation lengths are investigated and the resulting implications for the European power system are discussed. In addition, we compare a 30-node model of Europe with historical and climate change-affected data, where investments in generation, transmission and storage facilities are optimised. Differences in capacity factors among European countries are more strongly emphasized at the end of the century compared to historic data. This results in a significantly increased photovoltaic share in the cost-optimal power system. In addition, annual hydro inflow patterns of major hydro producers change considerably. System costs increase by 5% until the end of the century and the impact of climate change on these costs is of similar magnitude as differences between the ensemble members. The results show that including climate affected-weather data in power system simulations of the future has an observeable effect.

Inconsistent Wind Speed Trends in Current Twentieth Century Reanalyses

“…It is also highly relevant because of the impacts of climate variability on society. For example, the design and management of energy infrastructure is directly affected by climate variability (e.g., Bloomfield et al, 2016;Conway et al, 2017;Wohland et al, 2018) and climate change (Schlott et al, 2018;Wohland et al, 2017). Incorporating climate variability into transmission system design (e.g., Kempton et al, 2010) and wind park siting (e.g., Grams et al, 2017) facilitates integration of wind energy.…”

Climate change impact on Northwestern African offshore wind energy resources

“…Worldwide, the major renewable energy resources are hydro, wind, and solar; however, these resources are also affected by climate change through modifications of water availability and wind and cloud patterns (Pryor et al 2006, van Vliet et al 2013, Wild et al 2015, Huber et al 2016, Soares et al 2017b. However, to achieve a sustainable transition to renewable energy it is necessary to understand how they will evolve in the future at global and regional scales, in the context of a changing climate (Tobin et al 2015, Reyers et al 2016, Wohland et al 2017, Karnauskas et al 2018, and also investigate the costs associated with its implementation (Creutzig et al 2017, Schlott et al 2018. Nevertheless, the variability and non-dispatchability of renewables can play an important role in this transition (Heide et al 2010, Grams et al 2017, Bloomfield et al 2018.…”

How regional differences in cost of capital influence the optimal design of power systems

“…For this study, we use the pure linear approach, which has been used in several studies before, e.g. [2,36,37]. The optimization problem used to derive the optimal system design contains investments in generation, storage and transmission capacity as well as hourly operational costs originating from load dispatch.…”

“…These studies, however, often do not consider regional differences in the cost of capital: Schlachtberger et al [36], for instance, assumed spatially homogeneous costs for optimizing a European power system and for investigating the benefits from increased continent-wide transmission capacity limits. Schlott et al [37] investigated the impact of climate change on a similar system with the same homogeneous cost assumption. Bearing the results of Noothout et al [29] in mind, the assumptions made in these studies appear questionable.…”