Future Changes of Wind Speed and Wind Energy Potentials in EURO‐CORDEX Ensemble Simulations

Abstract

Renewable energy production is strongly influenced by weather and climate. Regional climate projections can be useful to quantify climate change impacts on renewable energies. With this aim, we analyze future changes of wind speed and wind energy potentials using a multimodel ensemble of EURO-CORDEX simulations at 12 km and three-hourly resolution, considering nine different global and regional climate model chains. A comparison between modeled historical 10 m wind speeds and ERA-Interim-driven evaluation runs for the same regional climate models uncovers some substantial model biases. The bias-corrected 10 m wind speeds are extrapolated to the hub height of a wind turbine to derive gridded wind energy output (Eout). The ensemble mean responses project only small changes of mean annual and winter Eout for large parts of Europe in future decades, but a considerable decrease for summer Eout. In terms of variability, increasing intraannual and interdaily variabilities are projected for large parts of northern, central, and eastern Europe. While the ensemble spread is quite large for interdaily variability, results are more robust for intraannual variability. With respect to wind speed characteristics relevant for wind energy production, a robust increase in the occurrence of low wind speeds (<3 m/s) is detected. Due to a combination of higher annual mean Eout and lower intraannual variability, climate change could be beneficial for regions like Baltic and Aegean Sea. For large parts of Germany, France, and Iberia, a lower mean Eout and increased intraannual variability may imply larger temporal/spatial fluctuations in future wind energy production and therefore a more challenging wind energy management.

Climate Change: Impacts on Climatic Actions and Structural Reliability

“…Influence of climate change in terms of wind speed and wind energy potentials have been particularly studied in [44], where, on the basis of an ensemble of EURO-CORDEX climate projections, a decrease of wind energy output for most of Europe has been assessed in the coming decades, even if updated climate change trends in central Europe seem generally less evident than previously predicted.…”

Impact of climate change on backup energy and storage needs in wind-dominated power systems in Europe

“…A statistical analysis of the output of 22 GCMs from the CMIP5 ensemble supports our findings, as the duration of periods with low values of the f -parameter over Central Europe is likely to increase. Large-scale climatologic developments leading to an increase of the seasonal wind variability were previously discussed in [22,24,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33]. For future research, it would be highly desirable if larger ensembles of dynamically downscaled models would be provided.…”

“…The latter is associated with an expansion of the Hadley circulation due to enhanced radiative forcing [30]. These developments are projected to decrease wind speeds during summer [22][23][24]33].…”

“…These seasonal changes have strong implications not only on temperature and precipitation patterns, but also in the seasonal wind regimes and intra-annual variability. The seasonal variability of wind power generation increases under future climate conditions [22,24,33] even though the annual mean changes are comparatively small [20, 21,23,24,33]. The impact may be large for the operational systems, and thus needs to be quantified adequately based on state-of-the-art climate model projections.…”

Modeling long correlation times using additive binary Markov chains: Applications to wind generation time series

“…As input we use the renewables.ninja [38] wind data set for Germany, which consists of hourly wind capacity factors (i.e., wind power normalized by the rated capacity) based on MERRA reanalysis data [39] simulating the 2014 fleet of wind farms for 1985-2014. A wind generation time series exhibits a seasonal as well as a diurnal periodicity [20,29,30,40,41]: The generation in Germany is usually higher in winter than in summer. The diurnal wind power variation weakly depends on the respective season.…”