Climate Modelling for Wind Energy Potential

The energy sector is highly vulnerable to climate change (Schaeffer et al, 2012). 

http://www.stakeholderforum.org/sf/index.php/our-publications/books-in-our-publications/56-climate-change-and-energy-insecurity

At the nexus between climate modelling and renewable energy, efforts have been made to model the impacts of climate change on wind energy. 

http://cleantechnica.com/wind-energy/

McInnes et al (2011) study utilised the global climate models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 3 (CMIP 3) to investigate projected changes in 10m wind speed and direction due to anthropogenic climate change. However, the multi-model ensemble showed a large spread in GCM projections. 

Further work is needed to elucidate how far finer resolutions and representation of winds would improve consensus between models. 

Since global climate models (GCMs) have coarse spatial resolutions, they are not applicable to explore regional changes in wind energy potential (Somot, 2012). Instead, regional climate models (RCMs) are deployed for projections of wind changes in the future.

Hueging et al (2013) applied a regional climate model ensemble for projections. The impact of climate change on wind power generation potential over Europe was investigated by two RCMs driven by a GCM. Nolan et al (2011)  considers the impact of climate change on the wind energy resource of Ireland, using an ensemble of RCMs. The Rossby Center's RCM (RCA3) was used and dynamically downscaled to provide high resolution information. Simulations were run for a control period (1961-2000) and future period (2021-2060). For Ireland, there is a projected increase of wind energy content for the winter season; the opposite is the case for the summer season. 

 However, there is a whole debate over whether RCMs actually add-value to global models (Feser et al, 2011). Also, the climate change signal could be of similar magnitude to the variability of evaluations and model simulations (Nolan et al, 2011). This means it is important to be critical of model results. 

Modellers should be aware of uncertainty. Projections of the impacts of climate change on wind energy is ridden with uncertainty: structural (model) uncertainty; parameter uncertainty; emissions uncertainty and assumptions of technology (Foley, 2010). Further work should be undertaken to reduce model biases and improve quantification of uncertainty. 

Figure 1. A taxonomy of climate model uncertainties (Foley, 2010)

Final Remarks:


Models can guide future energy planning and adaptation to climate change, but they are imperfect, since they cannot represent every component of the climate system. This necessitates careful interpretations of model results. Nonetheless, finer resolution models (RCMs) have improved understanding of wind variability on finer-spatial scales. 

References:

Feser, F., Rockel, B., von Storch, H., Winterfeldt, J., & Zahn, M. (2011). Regional climate models add value to global model data: a review and selected examples. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 92(9), 1181-1192.

Foley, A. M. (2010). Uncertainty in regional climate modelling: A review.Progress in Physical Geography.

Schaeffer, R., Szklo, A. S., Pereira de Lucena, A. F., Moreira Cesar Borba, B. S., Pupo Nogueira, L. P., Fleming, F. P., ... & Boulahya, M. S. (2012). Energy sector vulnerability to climate change: a review. Energy, 38(1), 1-12.