Mitigating a century of European renewable variability with transmission and informed siting

Jan Wohland,David Brayshaw,Stefan Pfenninger

doi:10.1088/1748-9326/abff89

Jan Wohland, David Brayshaw + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abff89

Copy DOI

Abstract

To reach its goal of net greenhouse gas neutrality by 2050, the European Union seeks to massively expand wind and solar power. Relying on weather-dependent power generation, however, poses substantial risks if climate variability is not adequately understood and accounted for in energy system design. Here we quantify European wind and solar generation variability over the last century, finding that both vary on a multidecadal scale, but wind more strongly. We identify hotspots and study dominant patterns of (co-)variability, finding that solar generation varies mostly uniformly across Europe while the leading wind variability modes reveal cross-border balancing potential. Combined wind and solar power generation in the current European system exhibits multidecadal variability of around 5% and can be further reduced through European cooperation or locally optimized wind shares, albeit the latter comes at the expense of significantly enhancing seasonal to interannual variability. Improved spatial planning therefore offers multiple options to mitigate long-term renewable generation variability but requires careful assessments of the trade-offs between climate-induced variations on different timescales.

Highlights

By 2050, the European Commission aims to achieve net greenhouse gas neutrality and considers renewables to play an essential role in eliminating emissions (European Commission 2019)
We evaluated the correction term for all possible 80 combinations of CERA20C and 20CRv3 ensemble members at three latitude bands and found that the mean spread is generally smaller than 0.1 m s−1 which is considerably smaller than other sources of uncertainty and can be safely neglected (details in supplementary information A)
Multidecadal changes stronger for wind than solar power We find that both wind and solar generation feature multidecadal variability irrespective of the chosen turbine or panel geometry

Summary

Introduction

By 2050, the European Commission aims to achieve net greenhouse gas neutrality and considers renewables to play an essential role in eliminating emissions (European Commission 2019). The atmosphere features variability on many scales (Williams et al 2017) and is connected to other climate subsystems that induce long-term variability such as the oceans (Keenlyside et al 2015, Farneti 2017). Quantifying long-term resource availability of renewable power generation matters because wind parks and solar systems are operated over many years and need to reliably contribute to future zero emission power systems. Stilling describes downwards trends in near-surface wind speeds over land in the period 1980–2008 (Vautard et al 2010). While stilling was initially thought to be mainly driven by increased surface roughness (Wever 2012), recent evidence of surface wind speed recovery since 2010 suggests a connection to multidecadal climate variability instead (Zeng et al 2019)

Methods

Results

Conclusion