Potential impacts of climate change on wind and solar electricity generation in Texas

Climate-Induced Tradeoffs in Planning and Operating Costs of a Regional Electricity System

“…We ignore climate change impacts on transmission and wind and solar generation. Transmission capacity is sensitive to ambient air temperature, so climate change could reduce transmission capacity. , Climate change could also affect solar and wind generation profiles, ,, which could impact our results given the substantial participation of renewables in our future fleets. However, downscaling future wind and solar resources to the hourly resolution necessary for our models is the subject of significant ongoing research and computationally costly.…”

“…New initiatives, e.g., high-resolution MIP, are beginning to release downscaled wind and solar resource data but available data is limited, e.g., wind speeds are available at the surface at 3-hourly resolution. Other research has used numerical weather prediction models to downscale wind and solar resources, but such models are computationally intensive and outside our scope. Furthermore, past studies have disagreed on the direction of change in solar and wind resources …”

“…Utilities have already started discussing adaptation strategies to address potential climate impacts on their grids, − which will manifest in several ways. , On the demand side, warming temperatures will likely result in changes in electricity consumption used for ambient heating and cooling. − These changes could result in increased total consumption and peak electricity demand. On the supply side, changes in streamflow could affect hydropower generation. − Also, decreased water availability and increased water and air temperatures could reduce the capacity and efficiency of thermal units. − Climate change could also affect wind and solar resources, transmission assets, and other technologies essential to a zero-carbon system. − Recent events in the US and Europe have already revealed the vulnerabilities of the power system to such impacts. − …”

Overcoming the disconnect between energy system and climate modeling

“…They use general circulation models (GCMs), which employ a physics-based dynamical mathematical model of the circulation on Earth, to derive long-term climate and weather projections. They might further refine the accuracy and/or resolution of their weather projections by bias correcting and/or downscaling, which use statistical [85] or dynamical [86] models to capture the effect of geography or other factors on weather that GCMs are too coarse to account for. To them, an energy system modeller is often seen as a downstream user of climate data: the climate modeller's primary focus is to generate high-quality meteorological data, and to provide access to the raw meteorological output for downstream users.…”

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 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.…”