Prospective climate change impacts on China's fossil and renewable power-generation infrastructure: Regional and plant-level analyses

Abstract

The energy infrastructure has emitted massive GHGs and will suffer greatly from climate risks. Given China's largest installed capacity globally, assessing climate impacts on diverse power infrastructures will yield critical risk information and support climate-resilient policymaking. However, lacking detailed plant-level data and ignoring the integrated infrastructural management of adaptation and mitigation priorly impede an in-depth evaluation. By employing high-coverage and -resolution plant-level data and the outputs of six CMIP6 models, we evaluate the pending climate impacts on five power-production sources at the interprovincial and plant levels in China. We find a pervasive negative impact on China's power sector, and the adverse effects expand over time (short-term: 214–342 TWh, long-term: 268–397 TWh, 25–75% quantile). For different future scenarios, the greater the radiative forcing, the greater the loss of power generation. Fossil-related production loss will completely offset the gain in most provinces from renewable power, with an overall negative impact in these regions. Besides, two evident phenomena occur: First, spatial heterogeneity appears across diverse provinces; second, a critical minority of China's plants with a low capacity share contribute to the main body of climate impacts. We consider the need for a targeted coal decommissioning strategy for climate adaptation.