Humankind, Energy and the Climate - A EURO-CORDEX Analysis

Climate change is going to alter the appearance of planet Earth throughout the century and beyond unprecedentedly. Therefore the United Nations (UN) decided to classify climate action as the 13th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG); right after the fight against poverty, hunger and other emphases. With the Paris Agreement from 2015, the world community finally got through to tackle this crisis in an ambitious step forward, aiming at a global warming rate of well below 2°C. However, it is by far not clear, how this task can be achieved in an economically sensible way; especially with regard to the first twelve SGDs, and, in addition to this, an ever increasing world population with around eleven billion human beings at the end of the century. This dilemma makes clear: future action against climate change must also develop solutions to the social questions from nowadays. But even more: it must be thought in a broader context, regarding energy security, population dynamics, economic transformation processes, as well as the general standard of living.

The presented work is the first part of a study that addresses these questions for Europe by cost-optimizing a sector-coupled network model of its energy system (PyPSA-Eur-Sec), done under two main aspects: first, the impact of climate change on the energy related infrastructure, and second, the role of socio-economic uncertainties in form of boundary conditions. The first is achieved by invoking all energy relevant meteorological weather data variables from the EURO-CORDEX climate projections. The second is based on social and economic projections such as the World Population Prospects from the UN Population Division.

The results from part one are given by an energy-meteorological analysis of the full EURO-CORDEX ensemble, covering three distinct greenhouse gas emission scenarios: RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. The analysis investigates the power output from wind turbines (sfcWind, rlst), solar panels (hurs, rsds, rsus, tas), and hydro plants (mrro, orog); each time for the EUR-11 domain and at the end of the century in form of a last-year approach. The resulting fields are evaluated in two ways: in comparison to each other, quantifying the uncertainties among the different climate models, and in comparison to today’s climate status quo with respect to the ERA5 reanalysis, quantifying any impact of climate change on the variables and their related power potentials.