Climate change impacts on net load under technological uncertainty in European power systems

Abstract

Renewable energy sources play a major role in future net-zero energy systems. However, achieving energy system resilience remains challenging, since renewables depend on weather fluctuations, and future energy systems are subject to major design uncertainty. Existing literature mostly treats these types of uncertainty separately. Therefore, the assessment of uncertainties surrounding climate change and energy system design, and particularly their interactions, is insufficiently understood. To close this gap, we evaluate net load to assess energy system stress without relying on perfect foresight, while maintaining temporal and spatial correlations of the climate system. Net load is calculated from hourly historical and future climate model data translated to energy variables. To scope the extent of plausible energy systems, we consider eight different design scenarios inspired by the European Ten-Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP) and different levels of transmission expansion. We find that climate change impacts on net load are highly sensitive to the energy system design, implying that energy systems can be designed so that they are either hindered or helped by climate change. Furthermore, within a system scenario, climate change can change the frequency and seasonality of high net load events and their technological and meteorological composition. Wind-dominated systems with currently electrified heating levels, for instance, feature a 30% increase of high net load events under climate change, mostly in summer and fall, while fully electrified net zero systems are impacted by high net load events in winter and spring, which decrease by 50% with climate change. Our work thus calls for a wider perspective on energy-climate stress that captures the non-linear interactions of climate change and system design uncertainty, thereby overcoming the current focus on cold Dunkelflauten.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: An illustration of the climate data conversion process through Climate2Energy and the eight different energy system scenarios used in this study. The first row (blue boxes) represents the scenarios that have fully electrified heating demand, while the second row (orange boxes) represents the scenarios that have heating demand corresponding to the current share of electrification in each country. The brown background shading in the first column represents the Ten-Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP) historical system setup (highlighted by a barrel icon), while the green background shading in the 2nd to last column shows the net-zero system setups: the official TYNDP net-zero system setup, highlighted by a leaf icon; the synthetic high wind setup, highlighted by a wind icon, and the synthetic high solar setup, highlighted by a sun icon. The historical and end-of-century climate period is symbolized by temperature warming stripes calculated from the data set.
• Figure 2: Distribution of mean European net load over all available time steps in different energy scenarios for the copperplate assumption. Results for historical climate conditions are shown in black and results using end-of-century climate are shown in orange. Subpanels are organized as in Figure \ref{['fig:scenario_configs']}, icons in the upper-right corner representing energy scenario choice. They correspond to the (a-d) electric heating and (e-h) mixed heating setups, and the (a,e) historical system, (b,f) net-zero TYNDP system, (c,g) net-zero, high wind system and (d,h) net-zero, high solar system setups. The black dotted line in each panel shows the net load 90$^{\mathrm{th}}$ percentile across the two climate periods.
• Figure 3: (a-c) Seasonal and (d-f) diurnal cycle of high net load events (above the 90$^{\mathrm{th}}$ percentile, $\mathrm{P}_{90}$ ) for three different scenarios, with simplified realistic transmission. Results for historical climate conditions are shown in black and results using end-of-century climate are shown in orange. The different scenarios are represented by icons in the upper-right corner and correspond to (a,d) "historical system; mixed heating", (b,e) "net-zero system; electric heating" and (c,f) "net-zero system, high wind; mixed heating".
• Figure 4: Violin plots of (a,c,e) generation and (b,d,f) demand anomaly for high net load events (above $\mathrm{P}_{90}$), for (a-b) all seasons, (c-d) winter and (e-f) summer. Results for historical climate conditions are shown in black and results using end-of-century climate are shown in orange. Anomalies are calculated over all available time steps in both climate periods. The scenario corresponds to "Mixed heating; historical system" (represented by the bottom left icons), using simplified realistic transmission. A negative generation and positive demand technology anomaly means that it contributed to the stress of the event.
• Figure 5: Composites of seasonal anomalies of temperature and 500 hPa geopotential height contour lines for high net load events (above $\mathrm{P}_{90}$) in (a-b) winter and (c-d) summer, for the (a,c) historical and (b,d) end-of-century climate periods. Anomalies are calculated from all available time steps in both climate periods, for each season separately. The scenario corresponds to "Mixed heating; historical system" (represented by the bottom left icons), using simplified realistic transmission. n refers to the number of events included in each map.