Climate change on extreme winds already affects off-shore wind power availability in Europe

Abstract

Off-shore wind energy in Europe plays a key role in the transition to renewable energy, and its usage is expected to increase in the next few decades. According to the working regimes of a wind turbine, wind energy production can be disrupted by extreme atmospheric events related to low wind speed below the cut-in wind speed and high wind speed above the cut-out wind speed. The purpose of this work is to estimate the behavior of extreme winds on the European panorama, over the period 1950–2020, in order to investigate the large-scale weather regimes related to them and their impact on off-shore wind energy availability. We detected significant changes in the frequency of high and low extreme wind events, proving that climate change or long-term internal climate variability have already affected the off-shore wind power output. Moreover, the analysis of weather regimes showed that high and low extreme wind events can occur simultaneously over Europe. Our results suggest the necessity to implement efficient European energy management policies, to minimize the deficit in wind power supply.