Validating EURO-CORDEX climate simulations for modelling European wind power generation

Abstract

As the energy system becomes increasingly dependent on intermittent meteorological sources, there is a need to understand better the possible consequences of a changing climate on weather variability and how it will affect wind power generation in the future. Most previous validation studies of regional climate datasets focus on the distributional properties or, in fewer cases, the variability at lower frequencies, such as interannual and seasonal. However, accurate wind variability at a high-enough resolution (e.g., hourly) is crucial for many aspects of power and energy system analyses. Using European country-level wind generation data and metrics relevant to power and energy system applications, we validate the wind speed output from seven regional climate models from the EURO-CORDEX project. We show that the EURO-CORDEX models adjusted with the Global Wind Atlas (GWA2) can simulate temporal dependencies and generation distributions with accuracy similar to or better than the ERA5 reanalysis. The spatial correlations, however, are overestimated compared to observations by most analysed models. Assuming the GWA2 scaling is also valid for the future, the projections under the RCP8.5 scenario show a slight negative trend (2026–2065) in capacity factors for most analysed European countries.