EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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3273. Identification of extreme weather events for the design of a climate resilient European energy system

Invited abstract in session WA-53: Pathways to Climate Resilience, stream Sustainable and Resilient Systems.

Wednesday, 8:30-10:00
Room: 8007 (building: 202)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Francesco De Marco
D-MAVT, ETH Zurich
2. Giovanni Sansavini
ETH

Abstract

Climate change impacts energy systems reliability. Extreme weather events, such as droughts and heat waves, can undermine the ability of technologies to convert energy and can exacerbate the demand for electricity, heating, and cooling. This causes unexpectedly high operative costs and, in the worst cases, inability to supply demand.
Hence, it becomes crucial to consider the impact of more frequent and severe extreme weather events during the planning of a cost-optimal low-carbon energy system to ensure climate resilience. This work introduces a method to convert the output of the global climate model CESM2 into hourly-resolved energy-related metrics, e.g., capacity factor, by capturing the impact of weather on conventional, renewable technologies, and on energy demand. Such metrics are used to parametrize a multi-year transition pathway optimization problem of the European energy system until 2050.
The resilience of the system with respect to extreme events is investigated through a scenario analysis. First, the system is optimized in a base climatic case; then, alternative extreme scenarios are generated via a boosting method that aggravates those short-term weather events that are most critical to the operation of the energy system. The new climatic time series are converted again as input of the optimization problem.
The resulting climate-resilient systems trade-off investment and operative cost to guarantee reliable and clean energy in a climatically unstable future.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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