The
electric power sector in the United States faces many challenges
related to climate change. On the demand side, climate change could
shift demand patterns due to increased air temperatures. On the supply
side, climate change could lead to deratings of thermal units due
to changes in air temperature, water temperature, and water availability.
Past studies have typically analyzed these risks separately. Here,
we developed an integrated, multimodel framework to analyze how compounding
risks of climate-change impacts on demand and supply affect long-term
planning decisions in the power system. In the southeast U.S., we
found that compounding climate-change impacts could result in a 35%
increase in installed capacity by 2050 relative to the reference case.
Participation of renewables, particularly solar, in the fleet increased,
driven mostly by the expected increase in summertime peak demand.
Such capacity requirements would increase investment costs by approximately
31 billion (USD 2015) over the next 30 years, compared to the reference
case. These changes in investment decisions align with carbon emission
mitigation strategies, highlighting how adaptation and mitigation
strategies can converge.
Electricity grid planners design
the system to supply electricity
to end-users reliably and affordably. Climate change threatens both
objectives through potentially compounding supply- and demand-side
climate-induced impacts. Uncertainty surrounds each of these future
potential impacts. Given long planning horizons, system planners must
weigh investment costs against operational costs under this uncertainty.
Here, we developed a comprehensive and coherent integrated modeling
framework combining physically based models with cost-minimizing optimization
models in the power system. We applied this modeling framework to
analyze potential tradeoffs in planning and operating costs in the
power grid due to climate change in the Southeast U.S. in 2050. We
find that planning decisions that do not account for climate-induced
impacts would result in a substantial increase in social costs associated
with loss of load. These social costs are a result of under-investment
in new capacity and capacity deratings of thermal generators when
we included climate change impacts in the operation stage. These results
highlight the importance of including climate change effects in the
planning process.
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