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

Ignacio Losada Carreño; Michael T. Craig; Michael Rossol; Moetasim Ashfaq; Fulden Batibeniz; Sue Ellen Haupt; Caroline Draxl; Bri Mathias Hodge; Carlo Brancucci

doi:10.1007/s10584-020-02891-3

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

Ignacio Losada Carreño, Michael T. Craig, Michael Rossol, Moetasim Ashfaq, Fulden Batibeniz, Sue Ellen Haupt, Caroline Draxl, Bri Mathias Hodge, Carlo Brancucci

Computational Earth Sciences Group

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

23 Scopus citations

Abstract

Wind and solar energy sources are climate and weather dependent, therefore susceptible to a changing climate. We quantify the impacts of climate change on wind and solar electricity generation under high concentrations of greenhouse gases in Texas. We employ mid-twenty-first century climate projections and a high-resolution numerical weather prediction model to generate weather variables in the future and produce wind and solar generation time series. We find that mid-twenty-first century projections based on five global climate models agree on the multiyear average increases across Texas in direct normal irradiance, global horizontal irradiance, surface air temperature, and 100-m wind speed of up to 5%, 4%, 10%, and 1%, respectively. These changes lead to multiyear average relative changes across Texas of − 0.6 to + 2.5% and of + 1.3 to + 3.5% in solar and wind capacity factors, respectively, with significant regional, seasonal, and diurnal differences. Areas with low solar resource show an increase in solar capacity factors but reductions in wind capacity factors. Areas with high solar resource show reductions in solar capacity factors. The spatial and temporal differences in our results highlight the importance of using high-resolution data sets to study the potential impacts of climate change on wind and solar power.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	745-766
Number of pages	22
Journal	Climatic Change
Volume	163
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02891-3
State	Published - Nov 2020

Funding

We thank Pedro Jimenez Muñoz from NCAR for his guidance to better estimate parameters that drive solar generation in WRF and Billy Roberts from NREL for creating the maps of Texas included in the manuscript and in the Supplemental Information. This work was authored in part by NREL, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. This work was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program at NREL. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. This paper was coauthored by employees of the ORNL, managed by UT Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. DOE. Support for model simulations, data storage and analysis are provided by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the ORNL. S.E. Haupt is supported by NCAR, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. We thank Pedro Jimenez Muñoz from NCAR for his guidance to better estimate parameters that drive solar generation in WRF and Billy Roberts from NREL for creating the maps of Texas included in the manuscript and in the Supplemental Information. This work was authored in part by NREL, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. This work was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program at NREL. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes. This paper was coauthored by employees of the ORNL, managed by UT Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. DOE. Support for model simulations, data storage and analysis are provided by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the ORNL. S.E. Haupt is supported by NCAR, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Funders	Funder number
U.S. Government
National Science Foundation
U.S. Department of Energy	DE-AC36-08GO28308
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Laboratory Directed Research and Development
UT-Battelle	DE-AC05-00OR22725

Keywords

Climate change
Solar power
Wind power

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1007/s10584-020-02891-3

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abstract = "Wind and solar energy sources are climate and weather dependent, therefore susceptible to a changing climate. We quantify the impacts of climate change on wind and solar electricity generation under high concentrations of greenhouse gases in Texas. We employ mid-twenty-first century climate projections and a high-resolution numerical weather prediction model to generate weather variables in the future and produce wind and solar generation time series. We find that mid-twenty-first century projections based on five global climate models agree on the multiyear average increases across Texas in direct normal irradiance, global horizontal irradiance, surface air temperature, and 100-m wind speed of up to 5%, 4%, 10%, and 1%, respectively. These changes lead to multiyear average relative changes across Texas of − 0.6 to + 2.5% and of + 1.3 to + 3.5% in solar and wind capacity factors, respectively, with significant regional, seasonal, and diurnal differences. Areas with low solar resource show an increase in solar capacity factors but reductions in wind capacity factors. Areas with high solar resource show reductions in solar capacity factors. The spatial and temporal differences in our results highlight the importance of using high-resolution data sets to study the potential impacts of climate change on wind and solar power.",

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

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Keywords

UN SDGs

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