Integration of climate-related energy sources across an alpine transect

The key challenge to satisfy electricity demand using a high share VREs is to deal with the variability of their weather variables, such as solar radiation for solar power, precipitation for hydropower, and wind velocity for wind power. The low production of VREs may lead to the imbalance between demand and supply, and shortfall risk. Accounting for climatic variability in this concern is highly important, because the shortfall risk may be enhanced by climatic change and variability, but also because climatic variability in the district area can make more robust the complementarity between VREs. This thesis aims to identify the climatic control on the structure of the complementarity between different VREs, analyzing the balance between energy demand and energy generation along a geographical transect across the Italian Alps. A transect from mountainous area in the Alps to plain area in Veneto region, where runoff generation is snow-controlled in the North and rain-controlled in the lower portions, is used as a study area for analyzing the impact of climate change and variability on VREs complementarity. This transect is also a good example for small communities that depend on the production of Run-of-River (RoR) hydropower and solar Photovoltaic (PV) for matching their electricity demand. In addition, this study area has high potential of Combined Heat and Power (CHP) fueled by biomass. In this study we examine PV, RoR, and CHP energy sources. Our results show that glacier shrinkage affects the increase of spring runoff and thus decrease the hydropower production because of the increase of inactive rate of power plant. The changes in hydropower production cause the changes in future demand satisfaction. Disregarding glacier shrinkage leads to an underestimation of future RoR generation and demand satisfaction from the combination of RoR and PV. We also highlight the ability of CHP to increase demand satisfaction and change the complementarity of PV and RoR, especially in the areas with snow-controlled runoff regime. The optimization of VRE production is not only for increasing the demand satisfaction, but also for reducing the energy drought events. We find that increasing the PV percentage in the PV-RoR energy mix leads to decrease the mean values of energy drought duration and severity and to increase the mean values of energy drought peak. Climate change may therefore be viewed as both a risk and an opportunity for power system performance, depending on one’s estimation of damage and ability to adjust operations and complementarity in relation to shortfall duration and magnitude.