CR2025_12 How will extreme weather affect the energy sector in Europe under climate change?

Lead Supervisor: David Brayshaw, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading

Email: d.j.brayshaw@reading.ac.uk

Co-supervisors: Reinhard Schiemann, National Centre for Atmospheric Science; Laurent Dubus, RTE France; Christian Grams, MeteoSwiss

Weather affects both electricity supply and demand, for example during still and cold winter days when low supply from wind turbines coincides with high demand for heating. Calm and hot summer weather can put pressures on fuel supply chains, the cooling capacity of power plants, and wind power generation, while also benefitting solar energy production. In the UK and northwest Europe, 2021 saw very low wind speeds, while the hot summer of 2022 brought shipping on the river Rhine almost to a standstill and curtailed nuclear power generation in France due to a lack of cooling water (Figure 1). These events highlight the need for the energy industry to anticipate and manage these extremes, which in turn requires research to determine how these impactful types of weather are affected by climate change: this is the aim of this PhD.

An important factor to consider when assessing the impact of extreme weather on the energy sector is whether their occurance is driven by “forced” climate change or “natural variability”. Forced change of Earth’s climate is due to, for example, man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Natural variability refers to variations in the climate system that occur even in the absence of forced change (and in parallel to it). On timescales of years to a few decades – i.e., the typical planning horizon for energy-systems – both potentally play a role in the extreme weather impacting the energy sector. Untangling the contribution of each is challenging and is a central research question here.

This project will therefore address fundamental science questions about extreme weather in a changing climate while also generating knowledge and data urgently required by the energy industry (e.g., Bloomfield et al. 2021). Using a combination of newly available tools, we will address the following questions:

1. What weather conditions are most important to the energy sector and how is their occurrence/persistence affected by forced climate change and natural variability?
2. What are the large-scale drivers of these conditions – can their occurrence and severity be linked to physical phenomena such as weather regimes and jet-stream and storm-track changes over the North Atlantic and Europe?
3. What storylines of future extreme weather and impacts on the energy sector are possible over the next decades, and how can the energy sector prepare for these storylines?

Earth’s evolving climate exhibits forced change and natural variability in parallel and the two cannot be diagnosed separately using observations. To achieve this separation, Large Ensembles of global climate model simulations are created in which different plausible evolutions of the climate are simulated by running a model many times over with different starting conditions. Large Ensembles are costly and a relatively recent tool for climate science (Deser et al. 2020), and a new Large Ensemble with the UK climate model has recently been created as part of the national science programme CANARI (Climate change in the Arctic-North Atlantic Region and Impacts on the UK). The CANARI Large Ensemble is unique in terms of the combination of ensemble size, model resolution, and available output to characterise the impact of weather on the energy sector. Within CANARI, co-supervisor Schiemann leads the creation of the Large Ensemble and this PhD project will be one of its first applications.

To address the research questions, we will first select relevant types of extreme weather (e.g., so-called wind droughts; Q1) and examine which large-scale atmospheric regimes are most conducive their occurrence (Q2).  A regime classification based on seven weather regimes that are defined year-round and capture the response of renewable power generation to the prevailing atmospheric flow will be used (Grams et al. 2017, Büeler et al. 2021).

Finally, we will derive storylines (Shepherd 2019) of climate futures: i.e., different possible trajectories of the climate system and manifestations of extreme weather using the Large Ensemble (Q3).  In addition to the meteorological characterisation, we anticipate coupling these storylines to established power system models (https://pypsa.org, https://callio.pe) – ‘optimising’ ‘dispatching’ a renewable power system across a physical network – to assess the resilience of the energy sector for different storylines.

Training opportunities:

The project includes a collaborative placement at RTE (the French power system operator) and a shorter research visit to MeteoSwiss.

The student will benefit from taking up to 60 credits of our globally recognised MSc courses, from the Department’s vibrant academic life – e.g., research group meetings (Energy Meteorology, Dynamical Processes, and Climate Dynamics) and the seminar programme – plus additional specific training from NCAS and CROCUS workshops.  The student will also be encouraged to attend ECMWF courses and international conferences & workshops (e.g., the International Conference on Energy and Meteorology and Next Generation Challenges in Energy-Climate modelling workshops).

Student profile:

We are looking for an enthusiastic student with a natural science background from subjects like meteorology, physics, environmental/earth science, or mathematics.  Background knowledge of climate science and energy systems is not required but may be an advantage, and interest in these areas is essential.  You should have demonstrated analytical and quantitative skills, and have an interest in study the physics of extreme weather events and the statistics of their occurrence and impacts.  The student will need to have or be able to acquire the necessary programming and data analysis skills required for the analysis of big climate data sets.  

Co-Sponsorship details: 

The project will include a CASE studentship with RTE France and additional co-supervision with MeteoSwiss.  Funding for multiple visits to RTE (Paris) is provided.  This includes an opportunity for an extended collaborative visit (several weeks to a few months) as well as multiple short (day or two-day) visits.  These visit opportunities will take place in addition to normal participation in national & international conferences as part of your studies.

References:

• Bloomfield, H. C., Brayshaw, D. J., Troccoli, A., Goodess, C. M., De Felice, M., Dubus, L., Bett, P. E. & Saint-Drenan, Y.-M. (2021). Quantifying the sensitivity of European power systems to energy scenarios and climate change projections. Renewable Energy, 164, 1062–1075. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2020.09.125
• Büeler, D., Ferranti, L., Magnusson, L., Quinting, J. F., & Grams, C. M. (2021). Year-round sub-seasonal forecast skill for Atlantic–European weather regimes. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 147(741), 4283–4309. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.4178
• Deser, C., Lehner, F., Rodgers, K. B., Ault, T., Delworth, T. L., DiNezio, P. N., et al. (2020). Insights from Earth system model initial-condition large ensembles and future prospects. Nature Climate Change, 10(4), 277–286. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0731-2
• Grams, C. M., Beerli, R., Pfenninger, S., Staffell, I., & Wernli, H. (2017). Balancing Europe’s wind-power output through spatial deployment informed by weather regimes. Nature Climate Change, 7(8), 557–562. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3338
• Shepherd, T. G. (2019). Storyline approach to the construction of regional climate change information. Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 475(2225). https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2019.0013