Climate and Weather Forecasting Applied to Renewable Energy Resources
Fig 1. Spatial mapping of predicted power loss percentage for the near futrue period 2030-2060 showing many regions with reduction, whilst there are regions with predicted increase, these tend to be regions with only moderate slar potential.
As more solar and wind energy is installed across Australia and the world, understanding the weather and being able to forecast renewable energy resources will be critical for exploiting renewable generation in the future and ensuring a stable network. Predicting passing cloud formations will help solar farm operators manage the expected drops in solar power; whilst frontal weather systems brings strong winds, so useful for wind power production. A further aspect is the impact of predicted climate changes on electricity production in the future. For instance, PV can benefit from a greater amount of solar insolation, but increased ambient temperatures combined with greater out put powers means the operating temperatures will rise. Higher operating temperatures degrade PV operation meaning less power pr unit of solar radiation. Which effect wins? When including effects from aerosols as well as changes in insolation an ambient temperatures a complex picture emerges where in some areas PV generation is predicted to improve, whilst in others it is expected to deteriorate. The magnitude of the change is also influenced by the technology used with thin film solar cells predicted to alleviate some of the impacts compared to silicon cells.
When focused on Australia with silicon cells, it was found that the higher ambient temperatures meant that despite higher solar radiation predicted in the future the overall performance would be expected to decrease in the emission scenarios RCP2.5 and RCP8.5 across all of the country, with the magnitude of the loss varying. This, of course, also increases the levelized cost of electricity from PV installations overall.
Finally, we have looked at the impact of climate change for degradation of the panels themselves. This includes permanent changes to performance beyond the usual reduced outputs due to higher operating temperatures, such as discolouration of encapsulant, delamination etc. This shows that not only can a hotter future climate reduce operating performance in real time, but can lead to higher levels of loss for permanent performance. These results suggest that panel designs may require some form of future proofing to counteract these effects dependent on the intended operational location of the panels a type of geographic bespoke design approach.
If any of this is of interest to you, feel free to reach out to me or anyone who is part of the REM team.
Fig. 2 predicted changes in the near future period (2030-2060) for common degradation modes for silicon solar panels. The results vary due to the different dependences of the modes on the climate based stressors for the modes, radiation, temperature, and humidity.
