Foreseeing the spatio-temporal offshore wind energy potential of India using a differential weighted ensemble created using CMIP6 datasets

Abstract

Offshore wind energy assessments help in identifying suitable locations for offshore wind farms. Its importance is further amplified in the context of climate change as wind power potential is susceptible to it. The present study aimed to assess the offshore wind potential of India and its sensitivity to climate change with the help of two different ensemble variants developed using nine CMIP6 Global Climate Models (GCMs). First ensemble is created with equal emphasis on all GCMs, while differential weights derived using Shannon entropy technique is used to develop the other ensemble. Created ensembles are further compared with ERA5 data. Comparative results suggest that differential weighted ensemble is superior to uniform weights in terms of bias. Owing to this, weighted ensemble is further used to study the impact of climate change on wind power density (WPD) for the near (2021–2045) and far-future (2075–2099) periods under two shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP) scenarios, i.e., SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5, the most widely used and probable scenarios. Findings suggest that WPD variation in the study area ranges between ＋10% and −20%. These variations are examined to study further the impact of climate change on geographical variations of WPD distributions. With the regions in Arabian Sea as an exception, WPD appears to increase in future scenarios. WPD varies more in far-future scenarios compared to near-future scenarios. The future variations of the WPD across study areas are prominent in the case of SSP5 - 8.5 compared to the variations noted in the case of SSP2-4.5. Findings of this study help stakeholders to understand the impact of climate change on offshore wind potential. Moreover, plots showing the variation of WPD for near and far-future scenarios complemented with additional studies help in choosing an appropriate location to tap the offshore wind potential in India.