Adverse weather scenarios for future electricity systems: long duration events
New datasets from project with Met Office and the Climate Change Committee on resilience of future electricity systems to adverse weather.
Tagged: Energy & Net Zero
The Commission and the Climate Change Committee have been working closely with the Met Office to develop datasets to test the resilience of electricity systems to extreme adverse weather.
The datasets just released represent the latest step in the project, which explores what is known, and what wasn’t, about weather and climate related sensitivities and risks associated with a highly renewable electricity system. They represent plausible but extreme weather scenarios than can be applied to electricity system models used across industry, government and others.
The datasets add value by increasing confidence that the modelling used to inform policy and investment decisions is resilient to a range of plausible extreme weather scenarios. They capture projections for plausible weather based on both historical information and future scenarios that account for climate change.
Moving to a highly renewable electricity system is a key pillar of the National Infrastructure Commission’s position on energy policy.
This work also builds on the existing messages highlighting the importance of anticipating events that could impact the resilience of infrastructure systems, and doing this in a transparent and consistent way.
The Commission will continue to work with the Met Office to develop new datasets to represent shorter duration extreme weather events.
This video records the most recent meeting of the user group for this project, discussing the findings of the latest Met Office research:
Related research - adverse weather and future electricity systems
Earlier research undertaken by the Met Office as part of this joint project includes:
- a report on characterising adverse weather conditions, from October 2020
- a report from the discovery phase of the project, from June 2020
- an initial literature review on weather and climate-related risks to energy systems, from the first stage of the project.
In February 2021 the Commission published a report on the Operability of highly renewable energy systems. This demonstrated that the current evidence provides confidence that a highly renewable electricity system, such as one with over 70 per cent generation from renewables, can maintain secure and reliable electricity without adding significantly to the costs of generating electricity.
Status: Analysis
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