Effects on power system operations of potential changes in wind and solar generation potential under climate change

Abstract

Climate change will likely impact wind and solar resources. As power systems increasingly shift towards wind and solar power, these resource changes will increasingly impact power system operations. We assess how power system operations will be affected by climate change impacts on wind and solar resources by generating wind and solar generation profiles for a reference period and five climate change projections. We then run a unit commitment and economic dispatch model to dispatch a highrenewable generator fleet with these profiles. For climate change projections, we use 2041-2050 output from five global climate models (GCMs) for Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 for Texas, our study system. All five GCMs indicate increased wind generation potential by 1%-4% under climate change in Texas, while three and two GCMs indicate increased and decreased solar generation potential, respectively, by up to 1%. Uneven generation potential changes across time result in greater changes in dispatched generation by fuel type. Notably, nuclear generation decreases across GCMs by up to 7%, largely in low-demand (winter) months when nuclear plants, which have a high minimum stable load, must reduce their generation to avoid overgeneration. Increased wind and/or solar generation result in reduced system CO 2 emissions and electricity production costs across four of the five GCMs by 8-16 million tons and $216-516 million, or by 2% and 1%, respectively. Future research should assess the atmospheric and climate dynamics that underlie such changes in power system operations.

Physical analysis of the environmental impacts of fishery complementary photovoltaic power plant

“…Solar PV power generation can effectively avoid problems such as environmental pollution caused by the burning and consumption of traditional fossil energy oil, natural gas, and coal (Nugent & Sovacool 2014). Additionally, solar PV plays an important role in the promotion of zero-carbon power generation technology among international, national, and government actors to mitigate climate change (Craig et al 2019).…”

Decomposing supply-side and demand-side impacts of climate change on the US electricity system through 2050

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Convection‐permitting modeling with regional climate models: Latest developments and next steps

“…CPRCMs were used in different studies to evaluate the solar energy resources and identify regions that have a greater photovoltaic potential over the contiguous U.S. (James et al, 2017), Kuwait (Gueymard & Jiménez, 2018), the Arabian Peninsula (Dasari et al, 2019), southeastern Australia (Prasad & Kay, 2020), and Lesotho (D'Isidoro et al, 2020). Moreover, CPRCM projections were performed to assess the impacts of climate change on the solar resources (Carreño et al, 2020) that would consequently affect power system operations (Craig et al, 2019) and high energy stress periods in a region (Texas) with high wind and solar penetrations (Craig et al, 2020). Finally, Chen et al (2021) highlighted the conflicting surface solar radiation projections over the United States from GCMs, RCMs, and CPRCMs that are likely associated with the transient aerosol scenarios used in certain models.…”