A new study published in Nature Geoscience has found that as climate change alters the global atmospheric system, access to wind for electricity generation will drop across the Northern Hemisphere, but will sharply increase in parts of the Southern Hemisphere and tropics — including northern Australia.
The use of wind energy for power generation is a key plank in the strategy for many national governments as they seek to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels and transition to a low-carbon energy mix to meet their obligations under the Paris Climate Agreement. Projections of wind energy resources are usually based on the present-day climate, and do not necessarily reflect anticipated changes in future scenarios. Regional studies have shown that the wind energy resource — the amount of wind available for converting into energy using turbines — can be subject to change in a changing climate.
The research team, led by Kris Karnauskas of the Oceans and Climate lab at the University of Boulder in Colorado, found that the projected drop in available wind capacity will particularly affect the central United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, along with the northern Middle East, and central, northern and far eastern Asia.
It’s not all doom and gloom necessarily though — the team’s modelling also predicted robust increases in available wind energy for tropical and Southern Hemisphere regions under high-emissions scenarios.
The team found these results by combining global climate model simulations with an industry wind power turbine curve, allowing them to derive the impact of projected changes in climate on future wind power capacity. Their findings are stark.
Wind power averaged over the central US is projected to decrease by 8-10 percent by 2050 and 14-18 percent by 2100, dependent on the emissions scenario. This decline in wind power can be explained by the rapid warming in the Arctic, which is reducing the temperature difference between the Arctic and the tropics, a process that ultimately drives the intensity of storms.
The team found increases throughout northeastern Australia and Southeast Asia, along with Mexico and Central America, eastern Brazil, southeastern Africa including Madagascar, the southeastern Arabian Peninsula including Yemen and Oman, and India. They note that these increases are only likely to be ‘robust’ under the high emissions RCP8.5 scenario — but under these conditions, Australia is projected to receive an ‘extremely large’ increase of of 41 percent improved availability in wind power by 2100.
The article has now been published at Nature Geoscience (subscription required to read full article).
