Climate change impacts on large-scale electricity system design decisions for the 21st Century

Abstract

Efforts to reduce climate change, but also falling prices and significant technology developments currently drive an increased weather-dependent electricity production from renewable electricity sources. In light of the changing climate, it is highly relevant to investigate the extent of weather changes that directly impacts the best system design decisions for these weather-dependent technologies. Here, we use three IPCC representative CO2 concentrations pathways for the period 2006--2100 with six high-resolution climate experiments for the European domain. Climate elements are used to calculate bias adjusted 3-hourly time series of wind and solar generation, and temperature corrected demand time series for 30 European countries using state-of-the-art methodology. Weather-driven electricity system analysis methodology is then applied to compare four key metrics of highly renewable electricity systems. We find that climate change does not have a discernible impact on the key metrics of the combined electricity system dynamics, and conclude that the effect on important system design parameters can likely be ignored.

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Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Impact of climate change on backup energy and storage needs in wind-dominated power systems in Europe
• Impact of climatic, technical and economic uncertainties on the optimal design of a coupled fossil-free electricity, heating and cooling system in Europe
• Using validated reanalysis data to investigate the impact of the PV system configurations at high penetration levels in European countries
• A validated high-resolution hydro power time-series model for energy systems analysis
• Renewable Generation Data for European Energy System Analysis