On the Impacts and Balancing Effects of Weather Extremes on Renewable Power Production in Europe

Abstract:

The increasing share of renewable power is associated with challenges due to the high variability in wind and irradiance. Spatio-temporal changes in the weather cause a natural de-correlation between wind and photovoltaic (PV) power production. It contributes to stabilize the total renewable power production, but the benefits of a mix of renewable energy sources has not been systematically assessed for multiple countries in Europe before. We here show results on the impact of weather variability and extremes on the production of wind and PV power, and evaluate the balancing effects for eleven European countries.

To this end, we calculated 20-years of wind and PV capacity factors based on high-resolution regional reanalysis data (COSMO-REA6) with a horizontal resolution of 6 km, and statistically assess the variability and extremes. Such re-analyses with increasingly high resolutions are being developed in the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostic branch of the Hans-Ertel-Centre for Weather Research.

We show that within the eleven countries assessed, a mix of wind and PV power can potentially reduce the day-to-day power-production variability by 29—42% compared to a scenario where PV power is perfectly correlated to wind power. Across the countries, there is less than 10% likelihood for co-occurring extremes in wind and PV power. To maximize the balancing potentials, the optimal ratio of PV power to wind plus PV power is 45—57% dependent on the country.

Our results suggest that expanding both wind and PV power production and transborder transmission reduce the impacts of meteorological extremes on available power.

The spatio-temporal differences in local weather therefore contributes to cope with extreme events in renewable power within and between European countries. Further research on which particular weather conditions associated to such balancing effects can support the future energy regulation.

Reference: C. Frank, S. Fiedler, S. Crewell, Balancing potential of natural variability and extremes in photovoltaic and wind energy production for European countries, Renewable Energy (in press)