Next Generation Challenges in Energy-Climate Modelling

A 2-day online workshop
22nd and 23rd June 2020: 6-10am Denver, 1-5pm London, 10pm-2am Sydney

Supported by the PRIMAVERA project under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, Grant Agreement no. 641727 (https://uip.primavera-h2020.eu).

Summary publication available in BAMS here.

Recent years have seen a growing appreciation of the risks posed by climate variability, change and uncertainty in power system operations and planning.  There remain, however, many scientific and technical questions to be addressed in order to fully understand climate risk in power systems.  This workshop will bring together an international group of researchers working at the interface between climate science and energy applications.  The aim is to stimulate an active and ongoing discussion around the use of both historic and future climate datasets in energy system analysis.  A fuller description of the workshop concept is provided below.

The workshop received enormous interest with over 140 applications from around the globe.  The organising committee would therefore like to extend our gratitude to all those who contributed “perspective talks” and participated in the many and varied discussions that took place. Further details (e.g., slide decks and workshop outputs) will be published here in due course.

Best wishes,

David Brayshaw

Associate Professor in Climate Science and Energy Meteorology, University of Reading

 

On behalf of the organising committee:

  • Hannah Bloomfield (Univ Reading)
  • Jethro Browell (Univ Strathclyde)
  • Roger Dargaville (Monash)
  • Matteo de Felice (JRC)
  • Paula Gonzalez (Univ Reading)
  • Katharina Gruber (BOKU)
  • Adriaan Hilbers (ICL)
  • Alex Kies (Univ Frankfurt)
  • Julie Lundquist (Univ Colorado)
  • Mathaios Panteli (Univ Manchester)
  • James Price (UCL)
  • Laurens Stoop (Utrecht University, TenneT, KNMI)
  • Hazel Thornton (UK Met Office)
  • Jan Wohland (ETH Zurich)
  • Marianne Zeyringer (Univ Oslo)

 

 

About the workshop

 

Motivation

Recent years have seen a growing appreciation of the risks posed by climate variability, change and uncertainty in power system operations and planning.  The traditional paradigm whereby a relatively small set (~1-5 years) of weather data were seen as sufficient for characterizing weather and climate risk is being replaced by one where it is common to see direct use of long-term climate data sets in energy system modelling, e.g., solving power system dispatch and planning with several or even a few tens of years of climate data, derived from historical meteorological reanalyses or global climate model (GCM) simulations. 

 

There remain, however, many scientific and technical questions to be addressed in order to quantify and understand climate risk in power systems.  In particular, recent work has highlighted additional sources of weather and climate uncertainty which are poorly addressed by current techniques.  This includes, for example:

 

  • the role of multi-decadal variations in climate,
  • the challenge of running multi-year or multi-decadal simulations with complex/computationally-expensive power system models,
  • reanalysis selection (differences between the weather recorded in different reanalysis products, e.g., MERRA2, ERA5, JRA55, CSFR, etc),
  • issues around the use of climate models (GCMs and RCMs), e.g., resolution, biases, process representation, inter-model differences,
  • error propagation in modelling chains, and
  • epistemic uncertainties of climate model and scenario choice.

 

Collectively, these issues are associated with relatively poor level of understanding of how these large-volume climate data sources can be ingested into complex energy system models to better understand and manage climate risk.  The links between the “energy” and “climate” research communities have historically been rather weak and, in consequence, it is rare to find the scientific best practices of each community fully embodied in any single study.

 

Workshop concept

This workshop will bring together a leading international group of researchers working at the interface between climate science and energy applications.  The aim is to stimulate an active and ongoing discussion around the use of both historic and future climate datasets (e.g., reanalysis and GCM output) in energy system analysis.  The workshop will therefore address four key topics over two sessions:

 

Session 1 (Monday) – The use of historic climate data in power system modelling

  1.     To what extent are the implications of “present-day” climate risk/uncertainty in energy systems well characterised by existing methodological approaches?
  2.     How can historic climate data be better used to estimate climate risk/uncertainty in energy system modelling?

 

Session 2 (Tuesday) – Climate change and energy system modelling

  1.     To what extent does climate change affect our understanding of future risk/uncertainty in energy systems?
  2.     What are the implications of using GCMs in the assessment of future energy-climate risk?

 

The intended outcomes are, firstly and foremost, to build a closer research community at the interface of energy and climate.  It will also seek to produce one or more white papers reviewing the state of the art and next challenges for the field.  The focus of the meeting is therefore expected to be on the scientific and technical problems associated with climate-robust energy system design and operation strategies (particularly relating to the electricity system but including elements of whole-systems where appropriate), rather than the provision of “policy level” insights into any single energy system design problem.

 

Registration of interest

Registration has now closed.