RALEIGH – Two new studies by a researcher at North Carolina State University offer insight into what West Coast electricity consumers might experience in two different future scenarios: one where excessive heat from climate change is straining the power supply, and one where the grid shifts to renewables. energy while the climate follows historical trends. In both cases, they found that electricity costs and reliability remain vulnerable to extreme weather conditions.
“The impacts of climate change and extreme weather events on the network, mainly in the form of drought and heat waves, will worsen with climate change,” said Jordan Kern, assistant professor of forestry and environmental resources at NC State. “Even as the West Coast grid shifts away from fossil fuels to wind and solar, these extreme weather events will still impact system reliability and the price of electricity.”
Published in the journal The future of the earth, the two studies project future electricity supply and demand under separate scenarios. In the first study, the researchers used computer models to simulate the impacts of climate change on the current power grid in California and the Pacific Northwest. They assessed the price and reliability of the grid under 11 different climate scenarios between 2030 and 2060, drawing on several scientific models of how the climate would change in the “worst case” of fossil fuel emissions, and another less severe scenario.
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“The worst-case scenario deserves to be examined even though there is evidence that the world will reduce fossil fuel emissions enough to avoid it,” Kern said.
Researchers have found a greater risk of power outages in summer and early fall, in large part due to the extreme heat in California that causes high demand for electricity when people cool their homes. They predicted that there would be scarcity events in all scenarios except one where climate change would affect power generation in both regions simultaneously.
However, they noted that such power shortages would remain relatively rare. The worst-case maximum was 72 hours of West Coast power shortage over 31 years.
“As it gets hotter and the demand for electricity increases, we expect the grid to go down,” Kern said. “These episodes of extreme heat are going to get much more serious. “
The extreme heat in California is also believed to affect the price and supply of electricity in the Pacific Northwest. Historically, regions have shared power.
“If, and this is a big ‘if’, the historic electricity trade continues and California has a high demand for electricity because of the heat, it could lead to a power shortage in the northeast. West Pacific because they won’t be able to meet their own demand, ”Kern said.
They also found that climate change could have a direct impact on the Pacific Northwest by limiting the supply of hydropower, that is, electricity powered by water. Snow is used as stored energy, so reductions in snowfall or changes in the timing of snowmelt reduce the power available in the summer.
The most significant effects of climate change on the Pacific Northwest would also occur in late summer or early fall, when the grid is already under stress. Even small decreases in stream flow in September caused by climate change, along with increases in demand for electricity in the summer, would be enough to cause more shortage events in the Pacific Northwest. However, they also predicted that West Coast-wide scarcity events due to climate impacts on the Pacific Northwest would be rare.
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In addition to reliability issues, the researchers also found that climate change would increase the price of electricity. In the worst-case scenario where climate change would impact electricity supply and demand in California and the Pacific Northwest, they expected more hours during which the wholesale price of l Electricity would peak at 1,000 megawatts per hour in California, especially in late summer. Climate change in California would also have a significant impact on prices in the Pacific Northwest.
“When prices go up to $ 1,000 per megawatt hour, it’s the grid that sounds the alarm,” Kern said. “They make electricity so expensive in part to get people to use less.”
In a second study, researchers valued the price of electricity through 2050 with more renewable energy sources added to the grid, while assuming that natural gas-fired power plants would still be in place as a backup. They compared five scenarios for each market: two scenarios that varied the solar and wind mix depending on costs; a scenario with more batteries added to store energy; a scenario in which many people adopt electric vehicles; and the trend for the status quo. They estimated the cost of electricity in these different systems over 100 years representative of normal and extreme weather events that could occur under historic climatic conditions – without further global warming.
“With the West Coast grid now, we know a few things about its performance because it relies so much on hydropower – that a dry year is a bad one and a wet year is a good one,” Kern said. “What we wanted to know was: as you decarbonize the grid in the west, adding electric vehicles, batteries, solar and wind, does that change at all? “
Even with renewables, they found that extreme drought and heat would always lead to extreme prices – with “good” years of the lowest prices due to mild temperatures and high flow, and the highest prices. high due to extreme heat or drought.
“When you think of the worst years, those conditions will always be determined by what drives these events today: lack of water or a heat wave in the middle of summer,” Kern said. “Adding renewables doesn’t change the worst or the best year, but it kind of changes things in the middle. “
In California, the future scenario with an increase in wind power has led to the lowest prices, followed by solar. In the Pacific Northwest, the scenarios with the greatest amount of wind and solar power had the lowest prices. Supply shortages are said to be the most common under the lane with the greatest demand for electric vehicles.
“As the grid uses more wind and solar power, the price drops because it’s cheaper and produces natural gas,” Kern said. “The exception is when you have a high demand for energy from electric vehicles, the demand becomes so high that it breaks the system. It’s quite rare in our models, but it happens when there is not a lot of water and there is a heat wave.
Kern said the planned reductions in greenhouse gas emissions under the five scenarios were “conservative”; their models chart up to 50% decarbonization through 2050, while most states on the west coast have set targets to make more substantial changes sooner.
“Our main conclusion was that as the grid decarbonizes, you will still be left with this vulnerability to water and heat,” Kern said. “It’s a system that can’t escape this.”
The study, “The Effects of Climate Change on Interregional Electricity Market Dynamics on the West Coast of the United States,” was published online in The future of the earth December 7, 2021. Besides Kern, the other authors were Joy Hill, David E. Rupp, Nathalie Voisin and Gregory Characklis. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation’s INFEWS program under awards 1639268 T2 and 170082 T1.
The second study, “Technological Pathways May Contribute to Exposure of US West Coast System to Hydrometric Uncertainty,” has been published online in The future of the earth on December 28, 2022. Besides Kern, other authors include Jacob Wessel, Nathalie Voisin, Konstantinos Oikonomou, and Jannik Haas. The study was funded by the United States Department of Energy’s Office of Science as part of the MultiSector Dynamics, Earth and Environmental System Modeling research program as well as the National Science INFEWS Program Award. Foundation 1639268.
(C) NCSU
