Renewable energies will play a key role in the energy system of Andalusia, Spain and Europe in the coming decades.
These energies have the advantage of a lower impact on the environment compared to other energy sources; however, their performance is conditioned by variations in weather and climate.
Like other climatic variables, wind or solar radiation are subject to natural variations over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.
On the other hand, the fourth IPCC report, recently released, shows considerable evidence that a significant climate change is taking place all over the planet, from which the climatic variables of interest in renewable energies do not escape, and which shows to be very marked in Spain in general and Andalusia in particular.
Thus, the paradox arises that renewable energies are, on the one hand, the main instrument for mitigating climate change and, on the other hand, the object of such change, which can slow down their development.
In short, although renewable energy sources can partially free us from our dependence on fossil fuels and be an essential instrument in climate change mitigation, they introduce another complicated dependency: weather and climate.
This dependence affects both the resource assessment process and the management, operation and integration of renewable energy production within the energy system.
Thus, knowledge of the available renewable energy potential of a region, including an assessment of its spatial and temporal variability and the possible complementarity between solar and wind resources, is key for proper planning and management of these resources and, in particular, for the integration of renewable energy production within the energy system.
The main objective of this project is the evaluation of solar and wind energy resources in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, their spatio-temporal complementarity and their possible change in the coming decades in the context of global climate change.
The MM5 mesoscale meteorological model will be used for this purpose. The project is structured in three parts.
In the first part, the MM5 model will be used to obtain maps of wind and solar resources in Andalusia with a spatial resolution of 1 km, temporal resolution of 1 hour over the period 1997-2007. In a complementary way, wind resource maps of the Iberian Peninsula will be obtained with a resolution of 30 km for the same period.
In the second part, from the previous data, a study will be carried out to show the possible existence of:
- regions with spatially and temporally complementary wind resources at Spanish and Andalusian level
.
- regions with complementary solar and wind resources within the Andalusian region
.
In the third part of the project, the possible changes in wind and solar resources in Andalusia during the 21st century will be studied in the context of climate change. In particular, climate change projections of solar and wind resources in Andalusia will be elaborated with a resolution of 15 km in the period 2000-2100.
The basic strategy will consist of performing a dynamic downscaling (or dynamic increase of the resolution), consisting of nesting the MM5 model within a global atmospheric model, which "contains" the real state of the atmosphere on a large scale, and which serves as boundary conditions of the MM5 model.
This model, in turn, takes into account local features (topography, vegetation cover, etc.) to obtain high-resolution estimates of the wind field and surface solar radiation.
Thus, in the first part of the project, related to obtaining maps of solar and wind resources, the ERA-40 reanalyses and the operational analyses of the European Centre for Meteorological Prediction will be used as boundary conditions of the MM5 model. The results will be compared with instrumental records from various sources.
In the third part of the project, concerning changes in renewable resources in the face of climate change, the outputs of climate change experiments performed with the global models HADCM4 and CCSM3 for IPCC scenarios A2 and B2 will be used as boundary conditions of the MM5 model.
With this, the climate change projections of wind and solar resources given by these models for Andalusia in the period 2000 to 2100 will be obtained.
