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Southward shift of the global wind energy resource under high carbon dioxide emissions

Nature Geoscience volume 11, pages 38–43 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

The use of wind energy resource is an integral part of many nations’ strategies towards realizing the carbon emissions reduction targets set forth in the Paris Agreement, and global installed wind power cumulative capacity has grown on average by 22% per year since 2006. However, assessments of wind energy resource are usually based on today’s climate, rather than taking into account that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions continue to modify the global atmospheric circulation. Here, we apply an industry wind turbine power curve to simulations of high and low future emissions scenarios in an ensemble of ten fully coupled global climate models to investigate large-scale changes in wind power across the globe. Our calculations reveal decreases in wind power across the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes and increases across the tropics and Southern Hemisphere, with substantial regional variations. The changes across the northern mid-latitudes are robust responses over time in both emissions scenarios, whereas the Southern Hemisphere changes appear critically sensitive to each individual emissions scenario. In addition, we find that established features of climate change can explain these patterns: polar amplification is implicated in the northern mid-latitude decrease in wind power, and enhanced land–sea thermal gradients account for the tropical and southern subtropical increases.

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Fig. 1: Isolating the impacts of GCM approximations.
Fig. 2: Simulated wind power climatology.
Fig. 3: Predicted changes in wind power.
Fig. 4: Evolution of regional wind power over the twenty-first century.
Fig. 5: Hemispheric-scale drivers of regional wind power changes.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the WCRP Working Group on Coupled Modelling and US DOE/PCMDI for CMIP, and thank the climate modelling groups (listed in Supplementary Table 1) for producing and making available their model output. We also acknowledge the WHOI CMIP5 Community Storage Server, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, USA (cmip5.whoi.edu). We express appreciation to the US DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory for sustained observations from the M2 meteorological tower, and to NOAA/OAR/ESRL/PSD in Boulder, CO, USA for archiving NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis fields.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Kristopher B. Karnauskas, Julie K. Lundquist & Lei Zhang

  2. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Kristopher B. Karnauskas

  3. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Julie K. Lundquist

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Contributions

K.B.K. and J.K.L. conceived the research; J.K.L. provided algorithms for calculating variables related to wind energy; K.B.K. analysed the tower, reanalysis and climate model data; L.Z. assisted with the diagnostic analyses; all authors contributed to the final interpretation and writing of the manuscript with major contributions by K.B.K. and J.K.L.

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Correspondence to Kristopher B. Karnauskas.

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Karnauskas, K.B., Lundquist, J.K. & Zhang, L. Southward shift of the global wind energy resource under high carbon dioxide emissions. Nature Geosci 11, 38–43 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-017-0029-9

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