Climate variability on Fit for 55 European power systems

RESEARCH ARTICLE Climate variability on Fit for 55 European power systems Matteo De FeliceID1, Derck Koolen1,2,3*, Konstantinos Kanellopoulos1, Sebastian Busch1, Andreas ZuckerID2 1 European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Petten, The Netherlands, 2 European Commission, Directorate-General for Energy, Brussels, Belgium, 3 Utrecht University School of Economics, Utrecht, The Netherlands * derck.koolen@ec.europa.eu Abstract The use of variable renewable energy sources to generate electricity introduces a depen- dency on meteorological factors into power systems. With the renewables share growing globally, often driven by political pressures, the reliability and efficiency of power systems are increasingly affected by this dependency. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the natural variability of meteorological parameters on the European power system in 2030. We specifically focus on (1) analysing the main European weather patterns affecting renewable energy production and (2) understanding the co-variability of this production among Euro- pean countries. The identification of a set of patterns in the behaviour of key power system operation indicators allows us to analyse the relationship between large-scale weather regimes and daily power system operations in a 2030 European energy context. Regarding renewable generation, analysis of the co-variability shows that European power systems tend to form two clusters, in each of which all the regions tend to show a positive correlation

among themselves and a negative correlation with the other cluster. Our analysis of the most important large-scale weather regimes shows that during cyclonic patterns, the carbon intensity of all the European power systems is lower than normal, while the opposite hap- pens during blocking regimes. 1. Introduction With the demand for sustainable energy on the rise, numerous governments and policy mak- ers around the world are announcing pronounced ambitions to increase the share of renew- able energy production in the electricity generation mix. In the European Union (EU), as part of the Fit for 55 package of proposals for delivering the European Green Deal, the Renewable energy directive puts forward a legal framework for the development of renewable energy across all sectors of the EU economy. The directive has been revised numerous times to accel- erate the roll-out of renewables and reflect increasingly ambitious climate targets. In 2023, the EU agreed on a revised binding renewable target of 42.5% of gross final energy consumption [1]. PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289705 December 20, 2023 1 / 16 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: De Felice M, Koolen D, Kanellopoulos K, Busch S, Zucker A (2023) Climate variability on Fit for 55 European power systems. PLoS ONE 18(12): e0289705. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0289705 Editor: Bruno Merk, University of Liverpool, UNITED KINGDOM Received: January 7, 2023 Accepted: July 25, 2023 Published: December 20, 2023

Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289705 Copyright: © 2023 De Felice et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Input data and the model outputs are available in the following two Zenodo repositories: 1. https://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.7065568 2. https://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.7996208.