Abstract
Climate change has a large impact on water resources and thus on hydropower. Hydroelectric power generation is closely linked to the regional hydrological situation of a watershed and reacts sensitively to changes in water quantity and seasonality. The development of hydroelectric power generation in the Upper Danube basin was modelled for two future decades, namely 2021–2030 and 2051–2060, using a special hydropower module coupled with the physically-based hydrological model PROMET. To cover a possible range of uncertainties, 16 climate scenarios were taken as meteorological drivers which were defined from different ensemble outputs of a stochastic climate generator, based on the IPCC-SRES-A1B emission scenario and four regional climate trends. Depending on the trends, the results show a slight to severe decline in hydroelectric power generation. Whilst the mean summer values indicate a decrease, the mean winter values display an increase. To show past and future regional differences within the Upper Danube basin, three hydropower plants at individual locations were selected. Inter-annual differences originate predominately from unequal contributions of the runoff compartments rain, snow- and ice-melt.
Highlights
Since climate change will certainly increase global air temperature, considerable regional impacts on the availability of water resources will occur concerning quantity and seasonality [1]
To cover a possible range of future uncertainties, 16 climate scenarios of four underlying regional climate trends were taken as meteorological drivers for PROMET, which were defined from different ensemble outputs of a stochastic climate generator based on the IPCC-SRES-A1B scenario
Besides its direct impact on hydrology, climate changes may change the characteristics of a basin in a way that calibration to past streamflow data, which included the influence of the glaciers, may force the model into inadequate simulations because it is calibrated to a different watershed
Summary
Since climate change will certainly increase global air temperature, considerable regional impacts on the availability of water resources will occur concerning quantity and seasonality [1]. This will affect all kinds of water users, water suppliers and water management structures. Hydropower represents the main electric energy supply. Alpine countries such as Austria and Switzerland supply over the half of their electric energy mix with hydropower. In Austria, 62% of the internal gross electricity supply was produced by hydropower for the year 2009 [3] and in Switzerland
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