Quantifying the impacts of climate change and extreme climate events on energy systems
Journal article, 2020

Climate change will induce not just a change in average temperature but higher frequency of extreme weather events, whose impacts are hard to quantify. Perera et al. quantify the impacts of climate induced extreme and regular weather variations on energy systems determining requirements for system reliability. Climate induced extreme weather events and weather variations will affect both the demand of energy and the resilience of energy supply systems. The specific potential impact of extreme events on energy systems has been difficult to quantify due to the unpredictability of future weather events. Here we develop a stochastic-robust optimization method to consider both low impact variations and extreme events. Applications of the method to 30 cities in Sweden, by considering 13 climate change scenarios, reveal that uncertainties in renewable energy potential and demand can lead to a significant performance gap (up to 34% for grid integration) brought by future climate variations and a drop in power supply reliability (up to 16%) due to extreme weather events. Appropriate quantification of the climate change impacts will ensure robust operation of the energy systems and enable renewable energy penetration above 30% for a majority of the cities.

Author

A. T. D. Perera

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)

Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa)

Vahid Nik

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Building Technology

D. Chen

University of Gothenburg

Jean-Louis Scartezzini

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)

Tianzhen Hong

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Nature Energy

20587546 (eISSN)

Vol. 5 150-159

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Subject Categories

Other Environmental Engineering

Energy Systems

Climate Research

DOI

10.1038/s41560-020-0558-0

More information

Latest update

3/21/2023