Abstract
Climate change will likely impact wind and solar resources. As power systems increasingly shift towards wind and solar power, these resource changes will increasingly impact power system operations. We assess how power system operations will be affected by climate change impacts on wind and solar resources by generating wind and solar generation profiles for a reference period and five climate change projections. We then run a unit commitment and economic dispatch model to dispatch a high-renewable generator fleet with these profiles. For climate change projections, we use 2041–2050 output from five global climate models (GCMs) for Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 for Texas, our study system. All five GCMs indicate increased wind generation potential by 1%–4% under climate change in Texas, while three and two GCMs indicate increased and decreased solar generation potential, respectively, by up to 1%. Uneven generation potential changes across time result in greater changes in dispatched generation by fuel type. Notably, nuclear generation decreases across GCMs by up to 7%, largely in low-demand (winter) months when nuclear plants, which have a high minimum stable load, must reduce their generation to avoid overgeneration. Increased wind and/or solar generation result in reduced system CO2 emissions and electricity production costs across four of the five GCMs by 8–16 million tons and $216–516 million, or by 2% and 1%, respectively. Future research should assess the atmospheric and climate dynamics that underlie such changes in power system operations.
Highlights
Over the coming decades, climate change will likely harm natural and anthropogenic systems and individuals (Fri et al 2010)
Using our unit commitment and economic dispatch (UCED) model, we present how those generation potential changes translate to changes in dispatching and system production costs and CO2 emissions from the reference period to climate change projections
Changes in maximum potential wind and solar generation We quantify changes in total wind and solar generation potential, which ignores curtailment during dispatching, under climate change by subtracting total wind and solar generation potential in the reference period from total wind and solar generation potential in each climate change projection
Summary
Climate change will likely harm natural and anthropogenic systems and individuals (Fri et al 2010). As part of a broad effort to mitigate climate change, many international, national and state governmental bodies have promoted zerocarbon electricity generation technologies, wind and solar (Meckling et al 2017). Despite wind and solar growth and other climate change mitigation efforts, annual average temperatures over the contiguous US have increased 1.8 °F since 1901 (US Global Change Research Program 2017). Temperature increases and other impacts of climate change will have demand- and supply-side effects on the electric power system (Schaeffer et al 2012, Chandramowli and Felder 2014, Bonjean Stanton et al 2016, Craig et al 2018a) including on wind and solar resources and generation (Pryor et al 2012, Wild et al 2015, Haupt et al 2016, Karnauskas et al 2018, Carreño et al 2018). As wind and solar capacities continue to increase across the United States, climate change impacts on wind and solar generation will increasingly affect power system operations
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