Abstract
In the coming decades, the European energy system is expected to become increasingly reliant on non-dispatchable generation such as wind and solar power. Under such a renewable energy scenario, a better characterization of the extreme weather condition ‘Dunkelflaute’, which can lead to a sustained reduction of wind and solar power, is important. In this paper, we report findings from the very first climatological study of Dunkelflaute events occurring in eleven countries surrounding the North and Baltic Sea areas. By utilizing multi-year meteorological and power production datasets, we have quantified various statistics pertaining to these events and also identified their underlying meteorological drivers. It was found that almost all periods tagged as Dunkelflaute events (with a length of more than 24 h) are in November, December, and January for these countries. On average, there are 50–100 h of such events happening in each of these three months per year. The limited wind and solar power production during Dunkelflaute events is shown to be mainly driven by large-scale high-pressure systems and extensive low-cloud coverage. Even though the possibility of simultaneous Dunkelflaute events in neighboring countries can be as high as 30–40%, such events hardly occur simultaneously in all the eleven countries. Through an interconnected EU-11 power system, the mean frequency of Dunkelflaute drops from 3–9% for the individual countries to approximately 3.5% for the combined region, highlighting the importance of aggregating production over a wide area to better manage the integration of renewable energy generation.
Highlights
In the near future, wind and solar power production are projected to contribute an increasingly higher proportion to Europe’s energy mix
For the remainder of this paper, we have chosen to classify an event as a Dunkelflaute event if wind and solar capacity factors (CF) both fall below a specific threshold of 20% during a particular 60 min period, which means both wind and PV power production being lower than 20% of their respective capacities
The extended high surface pressure area developed over the four countries shows a slack pressure gradient, leading to a much lower surface wind speed in the individual countries. This is likely to lead to much lower levels of wind power production over an extended area. These results are in agreement with previous studies, that show that large-scale high-pressure systems influence local weather and can further negatively affect both available wind and solar power generation [12,39,45]
Summary
Wind and solar power production are projected to contribute an increasingly higher proportion to Europe’s energy mix. We analyze thirtytwo years of power production and meteorological data to quantify various basic statistics (e.g., frequency distributions) related to the Dunkelflaute events which have durations longer than one day We believe that these statistics might be of use in the design of next-generation power grid systems, and in turn, reduce the adverse impacts of future Dunkelflaute events on electricity generation and transmission. We further advance our understanding of Dunkelflaute events by creating climatological (anomaly) maps of several meteorological variables (e.g., cloud base height) From these maps, it becomes evident that the Dunkelflaute events do not occur at the same time in all the countries surrounding the North and Baltic Sea areas.
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