Persistence of the high solar potential in Africa in a changing climate

Abstract

The African continent faces several challenges and threats: high vulnerability to climate change, the fastest population increase, the lowest degree of electrification and the need for an energy transition towards renewable energies. Solar energy constitutes a viable option for addressing these issues. In a changing climate the efficient implementation of solar capacity should rely on comprehensive information about the solar resource. Here, the newest and highest resolution regional climate simulation results are used to project the future photovoltaic and concentrated solar power potentials for Africa. We show that the high potentials for solar energy will not be reduced much throughout Africa with climate change. However, the PV solar potential is projected to decrease up to about −10% in limited areas of eastern central Africa; increases are also projected to the northwest and southern Africa (up to about +5%). These changes are mostly determined by changes in solar irradiance but in certain areas the warming is a critical factor limiting PV potential.

Current and future potential of solar and wind energy over Africa using the RegCM4 CORDEX-CORE ensemble

“…Given the different responses of different energy sources, complementary energy strategies should be used in different regions. The results of this study are consistent with, and thus reinforce, a number of previous findings over the continent (Sawadogo et al 2019a, b;Soares et al 2019b, andBichet et al 2019), although the magnitude of changes found in this study appear smaller than in previous ones, and some differences are found over specific regions.…”

“…At the seasonal scale, most of the Southern African countries are found to possibly experience a decrease in solar irradiance during June-July-August by 2050 (Fant et al 2016). Additionally, Tang et al (2019b) projected a significant increase in solar irradiance in December-January-February over Southern Africa under both the RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios by 2100 and Soares et al (2019b) found an increase in PV power potential over Southern Africa and a decrease in Eastern Central Africa under the RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios.…”

Climate change impact on Northwestern African offshore wind energy resources

“…For the area B1, the annual wind resource is projected to slightly increase, (under ∼+7%) throughout the 21st century due to a strong spring increase of wind energy, which may reach values of ∼+20% for the ROM runs and values below ∼+10% for the CORDEX-Africa MME. This is in line with Soares et al (2019), who showed that during spring, the surface wind speed and frequency of NACLLJ occurrence is projected to increase. In winter and autumn, the wind energy is projected to be reduced in the B1 area.…”

Sensitivity of surface solar radiation to aerosol–radiation and aerosol–cloud interactions over Europe in WRFv3.6.1 climatic runs with fully interactive aerosols

“…Previous works (Jerez et al, 2015;Sørland et al, 2018;Bartók et al, 2017) detected inconsistencies in the change signals between RCM projections and those from their driving GCM, which have been related to the way aerosols were represented in the RCM through their impact on the simulated AOD (Gutiérrez et al, 2020;Boé et al, 2020), in particular to their direct and semi-direct effects and their reduced concentrations in the future as long as anthropogenic emissions are projected to decrease. In agreement with these previous findings, insofar as we kept the anthropogenic aerosol emissions unchanged throughout the simulation period, our projections differ from those obtained with the GCM.…”

“…From the previous literature, we point out three key features that motivated the present work. The first is the increas-ing use of RCMs to evaluate renewable energy resources and their supply potential (e.g., Jerez et al, 2013Jerez et al, , 2015Jerez et al, , 2019Gil et al, 2019;Soares et al, 2019;van der Wiel et al, 2019). The second is the key role of aerosols regarding the accuracy of the simulated solar resource by climate models (Gaetani et al, 2014;Nabat et al, 2015b;Pavlidis et al, 2020), particularly attributed to their direct and semi-direct effects, which would help to explain the aforementioned discrepancy between GCM and RCM future projections (Boé et al, 2020;Gutiérrez et al, 2020).…”