A not so simple question

Last week I asked my colleagues in the wind resource arena the following question:

“If you were asked to include climate change impacts on an energy analysis, what would your approach be?”

I was aware that the question was not so simple  and opted  to propose only two answers:

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The message from the votes  is clear:  Increase uncertainty estimate won with 75% of casts. More than 100 people participated. However, I  don’t  know how many didn’t  answer because none of the options was  their option.

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Let me comment about the question and the possible answers:

Why asking this?

This poll was motivated by a related discussion I recently had. The context is the new requirements for climate risk disclosures that are changing from optional to mandatory as part of the DD checklist (e.g.,  EU taxonomy for sustainable finance, TCFD etc …)

Chronic changes in wind speed is one of the  hazards to be included in the risk analysis. Whether or not the relevance of these chronic changes is overestimated by a lack of understanding about how ‘wind resource analysis’ works is something we should discuss. 

At the same time, what exactly do we mean by incorporating climate risk impacts in a project? Working towards a common understanding is another interesting subject.  

I guess that the people who opted for the most popular option, ‘increase uncertainty’, were trying to find a compromise. On the one hand they need to acknowledge that changes on the global circulation matter: changing polar-tropical warming  gradients control the dynamic of the midlatitudes modulating jets and pressure systems, etc, etc.. These potential changes are not captured by the historical data. On the other hand,  future climate model projections  (CMIP et al)  are not considered as robust enough  to modify the measured P50 (something difficult to justify, especially with the developers).

On the other side, the minority (is 25% a minority?) who opted for modifying the P50 might be more convinced that a change factor can be, and need to be, defined to consider the large/regional/local scale impacts of global warming on surface winds (note that changes on PBL, atmospheric stability, day/night profiles, seasonality, are hidden in this change factor).   

The trap of the binary question

As suggested by Mark Zagar and Søren Mogensen from Vestas in the post’s comments and at the WRAG mailing-list, I missed a third option: “do nothing”. This option relies on simple evidence: projected changes are not large  enough and are smashed by the interannual variability or in the climatish language: signal to noise is less than one. Much less, about 0.2-0.3.

A fourth option was also missing. Why not frame climate change as a risk and incorporate the climate change factor not as part of the Energy Yield Analysis but as a stress tester , a sort of what-if decision tool? This option will circumvent the need for ‘engineering’  climate model data which are not designed to respond to wind farm EYA detailed steps, but to provide plausible future climate conditions (constrained by 1.5, 2.0,. 3.0 degC of global warming). This approach allows us to infer more robust interpretations of climate projections.       

Is this representative?

I would say that 100 people is a third of the audience of the Wind Europe Tech Workshop, which is, at least, a qualitatively meaningful number. Not bad.

So what?

Factoring in climate change physical risks in the wind resource and energy analysis is about understanding what might happen (including what we have never experienced), and its consequences (impacts). 

Chronic changes in wind speed averages can be derived from climate projections and used in different ways: either a factor or uncertainty, or to build what-if scenarios and do stress tests. 

Obviously, impacts are not just about these chronic changes, but about many other hazards (extreme events, flooding, coastal water level, fires, extreme heat …).

I think that the wind resource community would benefit from clarifying first what are the questions it wants to address. Data and scientific knowledge are here  to select the most adequate approach, to constraint climate projections, to interpret the future conditions etc … 

As said before,  what we are really talking about when we say climate risk impacts is a good starting point for the discussion.

Let's keep the exchange

On a side note, to talk about this fascinating, controversial and imperative topic, a breakout discussion group will be organized at the next Wind Europe Technology Workshop in Brussels in June. More information will be available at the workshop page very soon.

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