Climate change impacts on hydropower in an alpine catchment

Maran, Stefano; Volonterio, Michela; Gaudard, Ludovic

doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2013.12.001

Cited by 60 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This conclusion namely results from the numerous climate change impact studies on Alpine HPP (Alfieri et al, 2006;Haenggi and Weingartner, 2012;Manoha et al, 2008;Maran et al, 2014), and in particular in the Swiss Alps, where the high amount of glacier cover is assumed to increase the climate vulnerability of storage HPP (Fatichi et al, 2013;Finger et al, 2012;Rahman et al, 2013;Schaefli et al, 2007).…”

Section: Snow-dominated Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Projecting hydropower production under future climates: a guide for decision‐makers and modelers to interpret and design climate change impact assessments

Schaefli

2015

WIREs Water

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Hydropower is a key energy source in almost all world regions, it fuels social and economic development, ensures electricity security and is a pillar for renewable electricity production. But hydropower and its environmental impacts are vulnerable to climate change. This discussion of model-based climate change impact assessments and underlying modelling assumptions will help decision makers and scientists analyzing existing studies and identifying the most urgent open questions. Rooted in hydrological uncertainty analysis, this discussion focuses on the importance of local factors and on modelling uncertainties for a critical view on our ability to project future hydropower production in different world regions.

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Section: Snow-dominated Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Projecting hydropower production under future climates: a guide for decision‐makers and modelers to interpret and design climate change impact assessments

Schaefli

2015

WIREs Water

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“…For Switzerland, the country selected for our analysis, the available studies primarily consider the impact of climate change on hydropower potential (e.g., [32][33][34][35]) and some local case studies take market interaction into account [36][37][38].…”

Section: Climate Change and Water Availabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Climate Change on Swiss Hydropower

et al. 2018

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Abstract:Hydropower represents an important pillar of electricity systems in many countries. It not only plays an important role in mitigating climate change, but is also subject to climate-change impacts. In this paper, we use the Swiss electricity market model Swissmod to study the effects of changes in water availability due to climate change on Swiss hydropower. Swissmod is an electricity dispatch model with a plant-level representation of 96% of Swiss hydropower plants and their interrelations within cascade structures. Using this detailed model in combination with spatially disaggregated climate-change runoff projections for Switzerland, we show that climate change has ambiguous impacts on hydropower and on the overall electricity system. Electricity prices and overall system costs increase under dry conditions and decrease under average or wet conditions. While the change of seasonal patterns, with a shift to higher winter runoff, has positive impacts, the overall yearly inflow varies under hydrological conditions. While average and wet years yield an increase in inflows and revenues, dry years become drier, resulting in the opposite effect. Even though different in magnitude, the direction of impacts persists when applying the same changes in inflows to the 2050 electricity system.

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“…At smaller scale, more detailed analyses of single hydro power plants or individual catchments of the Alpine region are available (e.g. Koch et al 2011;Maran et al 2013;Bongio et al 2016;Majone et al 2016). To our knowledge, however, a consistent catchment-scale assessment of climate change impacts on hydro power generation within the entire Alpine region is still lacking (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of climate change on stream flow and hydro power generation in the Alpine region

Themeßl²,

et al. 2016

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Electricity generated by hydro power is the most widely used form of renewable energy, and as such, its vulnerability to climate change is of great interest. The aim of this work is to estimate the change in river discharge characteristics in the Alpine region due to possible impacts of climate and the related changes in the power generation of run-of-river hydro power plants up to 2050. Four representative bias-corrected climate simulations from the ENSEMBLES project are chosen based on the SRES greenhouse gas emission scenario pathway A1B. Data of these simulations serve as input for a lumped-parameter rainfall-runoff model at a monthly time step, which is calibrated on discharge data of gauging stations along important rivers in the Alpine region. A power plant model fed with runoff data generated by the hydrological model is used to compute changes in the long-term average annual net electrical energy output of hydro power plants for the whole Alpine region; while the model for Austria is based on known technical parameters of the power plants, a more simplified approach is employed elsewhere. The general warming trend observed in all four climate scenarios causes to various degrees a seasonal shift towards earlier runoff. However, more diverse changes in precipitation for the different climate scenarios and time periods result in diverging hydrological projections. Although the annual runoff is found to decrease in some scenarios, the generally observed shift of runoff towards the winter season that typically shows higher energy consumption in the Alpine region suggests that the overall impact for the electricity sector tends to be positive rather than negative. Estimated changes in the average annual electricity generation of runof-river plants are generally found to be within a singledigit percentage range but can be either positive or negative depending on the climate scenario. The estimated ranges reflect the diversity (uncertainty) of the climate models; the total bandwidth of possible changes in the water availability and hydro power generation in the Alpine region up to 2050 is assumed to be even higher, because of other uncertainties in the model chain that are not explicitly considered here. Nevertheless, as the general regional trends and bandwidth of changes in runoff and hydro power production strongly depend on the future changes in precipitation, the results of this work provide reasonable orders of magnitude of expected changes and are seen as a first step towards an improved understanding of climate impacts on hydro power production within the entire Alpine region.

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Climate change impacts on hydropower in an alpine catchment

Cited by 60 publications

References 7 publications

Projecting hydropower production under future climates: a guide for decision‐makers and modelers to interpret and design climate change impact assessments

Projecting hydropower production under future climates: a guide for decision‐makers and modelers to interpret and design climate change impact assessments

The Impact of Climate Change on Swiss Hydropower

Impacts of climate change on stream flow and hydro power generation in the Alpine region

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