Climate Change Impact Assessment for Future Wind and Solar Energy Installations in India

Solar and wind assets are climate-dependent and changes in climate will result in variations in their generation and intermittency. Developers of solar and wind parks in India have observed changes in climate conditions and variability in solar irradiation and wind profiles at the seasonal and year-to-year timescales. Future climate change perturbations, including monsoon shifts, could lead to lower-than-predicted wind and solar energy production and affect the economics of solar and wind assets. Regional climate models (RCMs) are the basis of climate impact assessments and the most trusted source of information to extract knowledge about future trends in climate variables. However, RCM projections are tainted with variability and uncertainty about the future trends. For India as a case study, we use the RCMs generated by the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment West Asia project (CORDEX WAS) to calculate individual wind, radiation, and temperature trends at selected sites; estimate wind and solar PV energy time series; and embed them in portfolio methods to test the impact of combining wind and solar assets on the variability of the total production and the uncertainty about the predicted production. We include a comparison of CORDEX RCMs with the ERA5 reanalysis dataset and conclude that all available RCMs reasonably simulate the main annual and seasonality features of wind speed, surface solar radiation, and temperature in India. The analysis demonstrates that the uncertainty about the portfolio return can be reduced by optimizing the combination of wind and solar assets in a producer portfolio, thus mitigating the economic impact of climate change. We find that the reduction obtained with a mixed portfolio ranges from 33 to 50% compared to a wind only portfolio, and from 30 to 96% compared to a solar only portfolio.

Automated summary

The study demonstrates that optimizing the combination of wind and solar assets can reduce the uncertainty in portfolio returns and mitigate the economic impact of climate change.