Dr. Hsiang-He Lee

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)

Abstract:
We assess potential regional impacts of climate change on wind and solar energy resources under a high-emission scenario using three climate model datasets with 25-km horizontal resolution. Focusing on the Western Interconnection (WI) region across the United States and Canada, our analysis targets areas with existing renewable energy infrastructure. We first compare present-day model simulations of wind and solar capacity factors to quantify model uncertainty and then examine projected changes across three time periods—present-day, mid-century, and end-of-century. We also evaluate the frequency of wind and solar resource droughts within the WI and its five subregions. Results show that certain subregions are more prone to energy droughts due to limited renewable availability. Offshore wind capacity factors are found to be nearly twice those of onshore resources, with lower seasonal variability, indicating potential for more stable renewable generation in the future.
In the second part, we evaluate the Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model version 2 North American Regionally Refined Model (E3SMv2-NARRM) for simulating multi-year climatological capacity factors of wind and solar energy in the continental U.S. Using multiple high-spatiotemporal-resolution datasets, we compare E3SMv2-NARRM outputs with production data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and benchmark models from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), including the Wind Integration National Dataset Toolkit and the National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB), as well as three wind datasets from PLUSWIND. E3SM solar capacity factors closely match those from NSRDB but tend to overestimate values by ~10% relative to EIA data. Wind capacity factors show larger biases along the West Coast, where the simulated seasonal cycle diverges from observations.


Contact: Dr. Yi-Chun Chen