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Climate change impacts on wind power generation

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 1, pages 627–643 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Wind energy is a virtually carbon-free and pollution-free electricity source, with global wind resources greatly exceeding electricity demand. Accordingly, the installed capacity of wind turbines grew at an annualized rate of >20% from 2000 to 2019 and is projected to increase by a further 50% by the end of 2023. In this Review, we describe the factors that dictate the wind resource magnitude and variability and illustrate the tools and techniques that are being used to make projections of wind resources and wind turbine operating conditions. Natural variability due to the action of internal climate modes appears to dominate over global-warming-induced non-stationarity over most areas with large wind energy installations or potential. However, there is evidence for increased wind energy resources by the end of the current century in northern Europe and the US Southern Great Plains. New technology trends are changing the sensitivity of wind energy to global climate non-stationarity and, thus, present new challenges and opportunities for innovative research. The evolution of climate modelling to increasingly address mesoscale processes is providing improved projections of both wind resources and wind turbine operating conditions, and will contribute to continued reductions in the levelized cost of energy from wind power generation.

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Fig. 1: Global wind resources, variability and wind turbines installed capacity.
Fig. 2: Projections of wind energy installations and associated climate change mitigation potential.
Fig. 3: Contemporary and projected mean annual energy density.
Fig. 4: Simulations of Hs from a coupled regional climate model.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) (DE-SC0016438 and DE-SC0016605). The research used computing resources from the NCAR-CISL programme (UCOR0020) and the National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) (allocation award to S.C.P. is TG-ATM170024). The authors express their appreciation to N. Davis of DTU Wind Energy for providing access to a digital form of the Global Wind Atlas mean wind speeds shown in Fig. 1a.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Sara C. Pryor

  2. Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Rebecca J. Barthelmie

  3. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Melissa S. Bukovsky

  4. Earth Systems Analysis & Modeling, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

    L. Ruby Leung & Koichi Sakaguchi

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  1. Sara C. Pryor
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Contributions

S.C.P. conducted the majority of the analyses presented herein, made Figs 1,3 and Tables 1,2, undertook the literature review and wrote the initial draft of the manuscript. R.J.B. conducted the analyses presented in Fig. 2 and wrote related text and wrote the initial draft of the wind energy industry trends. M.S.B. performed the WRF simulations that are analysed and presented herein and wrote part of the section on reconciling climate and wind energy science. L.R.L. helped perform the simulations presented in Fig. 4 and contributed related text. K.S. performed the MPAS simulations that are analysed and presented herein and wrote parts of the section on reconciling climate and wind energy science. All co-authors contributed to editing the draft manuscript and read and approved the revised manuscript.

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Correspondence to Sara C. Pryor.

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Pryor, S.C., Barthelmie, R.J., Bukovsky, M.S. et al. Climate change impacts on wind power generation. Nat Rev Earth Environ 1, 627–643 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-020-0101-7

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