Navigating optimal wind-solar trade-offs under climate change

The optimal wind-solar ratio (WSR) is crucial for ensuring the stability and cost-effectiveness of renewable energy systems, yet climate change may exacerbate WSR mismatches, leading to increased system costs and capacity demands. This study develops a climate-driven WSR optimization framework, integrating global climate models (GCMs) with a dispatch optimization model to assess the impacts of climate change on WSR under different scenarios. Our findings reveal that historical preference pathways often misalign with evolving climate conditions, causing sharp increases in both costs and capacity requirements. Notably, mismatched WSRs inflate electricity supply costs by an average of 23% across low-latitude countries, far exceeding the direct effects of climate change itself. By contrast, optimization WSR can effectively mitigate cost risk and enhance the resilience of power systems to climate change. Our results uncover a distinct latitudinal divergence in WSR, with enhanced solar dominance in low-latitude regions and a systematic shift toward wind reliance at higher latitudes driven by climate-induced resource variability. Our results underscore the necessity of region-specific WSR optimization strategies to ensure an economically viable and climate-resilient energy transition.