Impact of climate change on photovoltaic energy production in Italy using convection permitting models

Impact of climate change on photovoltaic energy production in Italy using convection permitting models

Milan Mathew¹, Giorgia Fosser¹, Andrea Cafforio², Anna Malagò² and the CORDEX-FPS-CONV community^*

¹Department of Science, Technology and Society, University School for Advanced Studies (IUSS), Pavia, Italy

² A2A S.p.A., Milano, Italy

^*A full list of authors appears at the end of the abstract

 

Italy aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and to reach 55% of renewables in electricity generation. Currently, renewables account for 33% in electricity generation, with solar energy production steadily increasing since 2010 and presently contributing 30% to total renewable energy production. As investments rise on these renewable energy sources, it is crucial to understand how they will be affected in the future by climate change. Clouds and atmospheric aerosols play an important role in the amount of incident solar radiation on the earth’s surface and thus photovoltaic (PV) energy generation. Previous studies have found that km-scale Convection-Permitting Models (CPMs), which can explicitly resolve deep convection, represent more realistically extreme precipitation, winds and snow  especially over regions with complex orography, compared to coarser resolution models. However, little is known in the CPMs ability to represent and project solar energy production.

Here, we use an ensemble of CPMs from CORDEX-FPS on Convective Phenomena over Europe and the Mediterranean (FPS Convection) to understand how PV energy production potential over Italy will be impacted in a warming climate. First, we assess the CPMs capability in representing PV production, estimated as a function of surface downwelling shortwave radiation, temperature and wind speed, against actual recorded production in four PV power plants in Italy. We found that most models are capable of  representing the PV production and its variability. Further, we assess how  PV production in Italy will be affected by climate change towards the mid-century (2041-2050) and end of the century (2090-2099) under the IPCC’s RCP8.5 scenario. The ensemble median indicates negligible change in PV production towards the mid-century. However,  at the end of the century, the ensemble median indicates a slight increase in PV production of 2-3% over most parts of Italy, despite the substantial increase in temperatures (~5⁰C). These results suggest that photovoltaic energy production over Italy is unlikely to be significantly threatened by future climate change and highlights the continued potential of PV energy as a key contributor to achieving the country’s renewable energy targets.

 

CORDEX-FPS-CONV community: Marianna Adinolfi³, Cécile Caillaud⁴, Samuel Somot⁴, Luna Lehmann⁵, Andreas Dobler⁶, Erika Coppola⁷, Hendrik Feldmann⁸, Hylke de Vries⁹, Rita Margarida Cardoso¹⁰, Pedro M. M. Soares¹⁰, Klaus Goergen¹¹

³ CMCC Foundation - Euro- Mediterranean Center on Climate Change, Caserta, Italy. ⁴Université de Toulouse, Météo-France, CNRS, Toulouse, France. ⁵Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland. ⁶Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Oslo, Norway. ⁷The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy. ⁸Institute for Meteorology and Climate Research (IMK-TRO). ⁹Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute KNMI, De Bilt, Netherlands. ¹⁰IDL – Instituto Dom Luiz, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal. ¹¹Institute of Bio and Geosciences (IBG-3, Agrosphere), Research Centre Juelich, Juelich, Germany