Multi-scale impacts of climate change on hydropower for long-term water-energy planning in the contiguous United States
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15548612 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Broman (0000-0001-8281-3299, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, corresponding author), Nathalie Voisin (0000-0002-6848-449X, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Shih‐Chieh Kao (0000-0002-3207-5328, Oak Ridge National Laboratory), Alisha Fernandez (0009-0000-8860-2468, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Ganesh R Ghimire (0000-0002-4284-3941, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 9 |
| Pages | 094057-094057 |
| Publication date | 2024-08-08 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environmental Research Letters (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1748-9326 • E-ISSN: 1748-9326 |
| Publisher | IOP Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1088/1748-9326/ad6ceb |
| OpenAlex | W4401408925 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 46 |
Climate change impacts on watersheds can potentially exacerbate water scarcity issues where water serves multiple purposes including hydropower. The long-term management of water and energy resources is still mostly approached in a siloed manner at different basins or watersheds, failing to consider the potential impacts that may concurrently affect many regions at once. There is a need for a large-scale hydropower modeling framework that can examine climate impacts across adjoining river basins and balancing authorities (BAs) and provide a periodic assessment at regional to national scales. Expanding from our prior assessment only for the United States (US) federal hydropower plants, we enhance and extend two regional hydropower models to cover over 85% of the total hydropower nameplate capacity and present the first contiguous US-wide assessment of future hydropower production under Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6’s high-end Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 5-8.5 emission scenario using an uncertainty-aware multi-model ensemble approach. We present regional hydropower projections, using both BA regions and US Hydrologic Subregions (HUC4s), to consistently inform the energy and water communities for two future periods—the near-term (2020–2039) and the mid-term (2040–2059) relative to a historical baseline period (1980–2019). We find that the median projected changes in annual hydropower generation are typically positive—approximately 5% in the near-term, and 10% in the mid-term. However, since the risk of regional droughts is also projected to increase, future planning cannot overly rely on the ensemble median, as the potential of severe hydropower reductions could be overlooked. The assessment offers an ensemble of future hydropower generation projections, providing regional utilities and power system operators with consistent data to develop drought scenarios, design long duration storage and evaluate energy infrastructure reliability under intensified inter-annual and seasonal variability
Baseline (sea · Climate change · Climate model · Drainage basin · Environmental resource management · Geography · Hydropower · Scale (ratio · Water resource management · Water resources · Environmental Science · Hydrology and Watershed Management Studies · Water resources management and optimization · Water-Energy-Food Nexus Studies · Ecology
A simple hydrologically based model of land surface water and energy fluxes for general circulation models
Overview of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) experimental design and organization
The representative concentration pathways
Climate change and the hydropower sector
Non-stationary hydropower generation projections constrained by environmental and electricity grid operations over the western United States
Impacts of climate change on subannual hydropower generation
The roads ahead
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |