Renewable electricity is a key enabling step in the decarbonization of energy. Europe is at the forefront of renewable deployment and this has dramatically increased the weather sensitivity of the continent's power systems. Despite the importance of weather to energy systems, and widespread interest from both academia and industry, the meteorological drivers of European power systems remain difficult to identify and are poorly understood. The present study presents a new and generally applicable approach, targeted circulation types (TCTs). In contrast to standard meteorological weather‐regime or circulation‐typing schemes, TCTs convolve the weather sensitivity of an impacted system of interest (in this case, the electricity system) with the intrinsic structures of the atmospheric circulation to identify its meteorological drivers. A new 38 year reconstruction of daily electricity demand and renewable supply across Europe is used to identify the winter large‐scale circulation patterns of most interest to the European electricity grid. TCTs provide greater explanatory power for power system variability and extremes compared with standard meteorological typing. Two new pairs of atmospheric patterns are highlighted, both of which have marked and extensive impacts on the European power system. The first pair resembles the meridional surface pressure dipole of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), but shifted eastward into Europe and noticeably strengthened, while the second pair is weaker and corresponds to surface pressure anomalies over Central Southern and Eastern Europe. While these gross qualitative patterns are robust features of the present European power systems, the detailed circulation structures are strongly affected by the amount and location of renewables installed.
The growing share of variable renewable energy increases the meteorological sensitivity of power systems. This study investigates if large-scale weather regimes capture the influence of meteorological variability on the European energy sector. For each weather regime, the associated changes to wintertime-mean and extreme-wind and solar power production, temperature-driven energy demand and energy shortfall (residual load) are explored. Days with a blocked circulation pattern, i.e. the 'Scandinavian Blocking' and 'North Atlantic Oscillation negative' regimes, on average have lower than normal renewable power production, higher than normal energy demand and therefore, higher than normal energy shortfall. These average effects hide large variability of energy parameters within each weather regime. Though the risk of extreme high energy shortfall events increases in the two blocked regimes (by a factor of 1.5 and 2.0, respectively), it is shown that such events occur in all regimes. Extreme high energy shortfall events are the result of rare circulation types and smaller-scale features, rather than extreme magnitudes of common large-scale circulation types. In fact, these events resemble each other more strongly than their respective weather regime mean pattern. For (sub-) seasonal forecasting applications weather regimes may be of use for the energy sector. At shorter lead times or for more detailed system analyses, their ineffectiveness at characterising extreme events limits their potential.
Large quantities of weather-dependent renewable energy generation are expected in power systems under climate change mitigation policies, yet little attention has been given to the impact of long term climate variability. By combining state-of-the-art multi-decadal meteorological records with a parsimonious representation of a power system, this study characterises the impact of year-to-year climate variability on multiple aspects of the power system of Great Britain (including coal, gas and nuclear generation), demonstrating why multi-decadal approaches are necessary. All aspects of the example system are impacted by inter-annual climate variability, with the impacts being most pronounced for baseload generation. The impacts of inter-annual climate variability increase in a 2025 wind-power scenario, with a 4-fold increase in the inter-annual range of operating hours for baseload such as nuclear. The impacts on peak load and peaking-plant are comparably small. Less than 10 years of power supply and demand data are shown to be insufficient for providing robust power system planning guidance. This suggests renewable integration studies-widely used in policy, investment and system design-should adopt a more robust approach to climate characterisation.
The increasing use of intermittent renewable generation (such as wind) is increasing the exposure of national power systems to meteorological variability. This study identifies how the integration of wind power in one particular country (Great Britain, GB) is affecting the overall sensitivity of the power system to weather using three key metrics: total annual energy requirement, peak residual load (from sources other than wind) and wind power curtailment.The present-day level of wind power capacity (approximately 15 GW) is shown to have already changed the power system's overall sensitivity to weather in terms of the total annual energy requirement, from a temperature-to a wind-dominated regime (which occurred with 6GW of installed wind power capacity). Peak residual load from sources other than wind also shows a similar shift. The associated changes in the synoptic-and large-scale meteorological drivers associated with each metric are identified and discussed. In a period where power systems are changing rapidly, it is therefore argued that past experience of the weather impacts on the GB power system may not be a good guide for the impact on the present or near-future power system.
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