| dc.description.abstract | This thesis characterizes the meteorological weather patterns leading to high societal impact. High societal impacts can be either due to low compound wind and solar energy production, or due to high energy shortage.
The share of renewable energy, like wind and solar energy, in the electrical grid, will likely increase as mitigation measures for future climate change are put into effect. Renewable energy production is largely dependent on the variability of the weather and is thus subject to variability on all timescales. This variability can be partly compensated for by integrating the wind and solar energy resources over a large area. However, the weather not only affects the production of renewable energy, but also the energy demand.
For this study we use 2000 years of simulated daily meteorological conditions to calculate 2000 years of daily compound wind and solar energy production, based on a projected distribution of renewable energy sources, to calculate 2000 years of projected daily energy demand and shortage. Meteorological input data are generated with the global climate model EC-Earth V2.3. The selection of the high-impact events is based on the highest societal impact rather than on the extremeness of a chosen meteorological variable.
It is found that the 1-in-10 year highest impact events for one-day low compound energy production are extended high-pressure systems in winter over central Europe, causing low wind speed conditions with minimal incoming solar radiation. Of these events only 1% is also considered as a high-impact event on a weekly timescale, as the very stationary and persistent highpressure systems needed are only observed in the summer. For 1-in-10 year high energy shortage events the weather patterns are characterized by a similar high-pressure system, but situated a bit more to the north and accompanied by anomalously cold temperatures throughout the region. Of these events, 13.5% is also the determinative high-impact event on a weekly timescale. For both low compound energy production and high energy shortage the highest daily societal impact extremes are found to not be the same as the impact caused by the most extreme weather conditions. Assuming no changes in the distribution of renewable energy sources and with a constant temperature dependency of demand, the change in the occurrence of the highest societal impact events for energy shortage is found to be much smaller then the signal found due to inter-model differences. | |
