Abstract
Sustainable development requires climate change mitigation and thereby a fast energy transition to renewables. However, climate change may affect renewable power outputs by enhancing the weather variability and making extreme conditions more frequent. High temperature or clouds, for example, can lead to poorer photovoltaic (PV) power outputs. Here, we assess global changes in the frequency of warm and cloudy conditions that lead to very low PV power outputs. Using simulations from global climate models (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5), we show that summer days with very low PV power outputs are expected to double in the Arabian Peninsula by mid-century but could be reduced by half in southern Europe over the same period, even under a moderate-emission scenario. Changes for winter, either enhancing or mitigating the PV power intermittency, are projected to be less striking, at least in low- and mid-latitude regions. Our results present valuable information for energy planners to compensate for the effects of future weather variability.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request. The data from the GCMs were obtained from the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group for CMIP5 (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/).
Code availability
The code generated during the current study is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the support of FONDECYT (Preis 1191932) and CORFO (Preis 19BP-117358, 18BPCR-89100 and 18BPE-93920). A.D. was supported by the JST CREST grant number JPMJCR15K4. We also thank the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modelling groups used in this study for producing and making available their model outputs.
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S.F., R.R.C. and R.B.J. conceived and designed the experiments. S.F., R.R.C. and A.D. analysed the data. S.F., R.R.C. and R.B.J. wrote the paper.
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Feron, S., Cordero, R.R., Damiani, A. et al. Climate change extremes and photovoltaic power output. Nat Sustain 4, 270–276 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-00643-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-00643-w
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