The Impacts of Climate Variability and Climate Change on the Indian Power System

Energy systems across the globe are evolving to meet climate mitigation targets set by the Paris agreement. This process requires a rapid reduction of nations’ reliance on fossil fuels (such as coal, oil and natural gas) and significant uptake of renewable generation (such as wind power, solar power and hydropower). India already has a large existing proportion of renewable generation (42.8 GW of wind power, 67.1 GW of solar power and 46.9 GW of large hydropower installed as of July 2023).The increased amounts of renewable generation within power systems makes them increasingly weather-dependent, and susceptible to times of energy system stress driven by large-scale weather conditions. For India, such weather conditions could include heatwaves - causing high demand and low renewable generation - or tropical cyclones - causing damage to energy system components. Previous work has shown we can create highly effective models of existing state-level demand, wind power and solar power generation. However, the impacts of multi-decadal climate variability and climate change on the Indian power system remain poorly understood. This project therefore uses state-of-the-art climate data from the 6th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) to investigate the impacts of climate variability and climate change on energy system components (such as demand, wind, and solar), and the potential for climate change to increase the exposure of the Indian power system to energy system stress events. To achieve this, we will use existing energy system component models, and develop new inputs to national-scale power system model simulations (using tools such as PyPSA-EARTH) to understand the energy system impacts more rigorously. Ideas to present include demonstrating how the raw climate datasets have been processed for energy system modelling, as well as some initial results for Indian solar and wind power models