Climate impacts on the energy system

An increasing reliance on renewable energy will help to mitigate climate change, but this also brings new challenges. Renewable energy supply is dependent on atmospheric processes, such as wind, precipitation and cloudiness, and therefore, the vulnerability of the energy system to climate change could increase in the future with the increasing shares of renewables in the energy mix.  In this paper, we implement a systematic model comparison for assessing the capacity of energy systems to deal with climate change under a low level (SSP2-RCP2.6), and a medium level (SSP2-RCP6.0) of climate change scenarios for ten aggregated world regions. The impacts on the energy system are analyzed via the impacts on renewable energy potential. To this end, information on cost-supply curves from eight renewable energy technologies derived from data of four climate models (GCMs) was implemented on the IMAGE and GCAM integrated assessment models (IAMs).

With this comparison, we explore uncertainties in the energy system response, the level of climate change, and the climate system uncertainties. Some robust findings consistent across the GCMs and IAMs for the period 2071-2100 are an expected increase in bioenergy use for most regions under both scenarios when the CO₂ fertilization effect is considered. Under the RCP6.0 scenario, an increase in hydropower and wind use in Asia (excluding China) can be expected. However, for India, a decrease in solar energy use can be expected with both scenarios and models.