For energy systems that power a reliable grid, the future is all about location

Will a warming climate and changing weather patterns lead to more grid blackouts and other energy disruptions? Answering that question requires studying both regional climate forecasts and local energy systems, including emerging renewable generation, storage, transmission lines, and demand forecasts. The lack of such studies is one reason why energy developers and grid operators rarely consider climate change when deciding where to build their next project.Now MIT researchers have created a way to make more climate-informed energy siting choices, and shown how it can be used to make energy systems more resilient and reduce blackouts. The researchers’ framework, described today in Nature Energy, combines fine-scale meteorology with detailed simulations of energy infrastructure. It shows how the location of new energy projects will play a significant role in meeting future demand in a changing climate.The researchers applied their framework to decarbonized energy systems in New England and Texas, finding that energy systems designed for historic climate conditions could face up to a fivefold increase in energy shortfalls, potentially leading to blackouts, by 2050. Taking climate change into account when designing the system, conversely, improved the resilience of both regions’ energy systems at no or very little additional costs.“As we mitigate climate change with renewables, we can also adapt to climate change by using future weather projections in our power system planning, and the extra costs of that adaptation are, at least in this study, not much,” says senior author Michael Howland, MIT’s Jeffrey Cheah Career Development Professor. “It’s different from other climate adaptation studies, where building a big seawall or other mitigation efforts are really expensive. In this case, if we’re smart when we design our power system decarbonization plans, it could cost almost nothing extra to simultaneously adapt to climate change.”Joining Howland on the paper are first author Liying Qiu, a former MIT postdoc; Rahman Khorramfar and Shen Wang, current postdocs at MIT; and Saurabh Amin, MIT’s Edmund K. Turner Professor in Civil Engineering.A better way to think about energy projectsThe world’s energy systems are in a period of change. On the demand side, that change is driven by trends like the rising demand for artificial intelligence and the electrification of industries including transportation. On the supply side, that change is driven by the plummeting costs of renewable systems like solar and wind energy.“That drop in costs has enabled the widespread deployment of renewables, because they’re the cheapest electricity-generation solution in many locations,” Howland explains. “At the same time, for the first time in more than a decade, electricity demand is starting to increase in the U.S.”As low-cost variable renewable energy supplies increase, matching supply and demand throughout the day can become a harder problem for energy system operators. Adding to that complexity is the fact that renewables and energy demand are both influenced by weather and climate in different ways in different regions.In the past, researchers have generally studied the impacts of climate change on individual technologies, for instance studying how it might change global wind and solar patterns. Other studies have considered the impact of climate change on states or other large areas, overlooking the specifics of regional energy systems. More recently, region-specific studies have been done but typically relied on low-resolution, global climate models.“That’s what climate models are good at: giving you the global picture at coarse resolution,” Howland explains. “That limits insights for regional system planning and risk assessments.”For their paper, the MIT researchers chose to study Texas and New England because they provided two different climate types and energy systems. The team used fine-scale meteorology models and considered the influence of climate change on weather-related energy failures.“This study explores the joint, simultaneous impacts on multiple components of the energy system, similar to compound events studied in climate science,” Howland explains. “An extreme weather event can impact wind and solar generation and electricity demand all at the same time. Our hypothesis is that’s likely to be the biggest impact we’ll see from climate change on energy systems.”The researchers also considered the impact of using climate change models to help site energy projects, looking out to 2050 because that’s the typical lifetime of wind and solar plants being built today. They found that locations that are best suited to provide the renewable wind and solar energy that the grid needs were meaningfully different in future climate conditions than in the historic climate.The researchers found that climate change could increase energy failures by as much as 500 percent by 2050 if the siting did not consider future climate conditions. Such failures were driven primarily by the interaction between multiday renewable shortfalls and energy system design decisions like where to build solar farms and transmission lines.“We are telling people where you put your wind and solar matters a lot for your ability to deliver energy when you need it,” Qiu explains. “We need to think more about the when and where of adding renewables rather than only focusing on adding overall capacity.”In New England’s power system, the researchers found that energy supply disruptions caused by climate-related weather changes necessitate investment in solar capacity and transmission lines close to energy demand centers like cities. In Texas, energy disruption risks were primarily driven by transmission constraints.The researchers found that climate-informed designs would prioritize adding wind farms in West Texas to better align with future demand patterns. The study assumes both regions will continue adding renewable capacity, thus the researchers concluded that Texas could improve the resilience of its grid at near-zero additional cost.“We are showing that increasing energy resilience requires more than just spending more money,” Qiu says. “It primarily requires better and smarter planning.”A new approach to adaptationHowland says taking a broader view of climate change’s impact on energy systems helped his team get a clearer picture of blackout risks and other potential supply problems.“On the individual power plant level, it’s not necessarily that climate change is a dominant uncertainty, so it really comes down to how all these energy system components and energy demand relate to each other,” Howland says. “That’s where we see the biggest impact of climate change, rather than on the level of individual wind or solar plants.”Because the researchers used expensive, high-resolution models, Howland says their new model wouldn’t be practical for grid operators to use in their daily work today, but they hope to soon develop faster models that grid operators could use more easily.“This study shows the opportunity and the need,” Howland says. “There are risks to not adapting our system, but if we do adapt our system, there could be big opportunities that are not costly. Now the key challenge is that we have to address the massive data and translation gap we have between meteorology and energy system planning and management. Right now, there’s too big of a divide between climate and weather modelers and power system practitioners. We want to continue to break that barrier down through interdisciplinary research.”This work was supported by the MIT Climate Grand Challenges, the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, and the MIT Energy Initiative Future Energy Systems Center.