WTW Renewable Energy Market Review 2024
El Niño and La Niña are the leading causes of year-over-year changes in global weather. Keeping a watch on the tropical Pacific can help you predict high or low renewable power generation months in advance.
Renewable energy from wind, water or solar power is intrinsically variable. In the absence of significantly oversized production or the widespread deployment of high-capacity storage devices, these sources will continue to be vulnerable to disruption caused by weak winds, dry spells and cloudy skies. How can renewable energy stakeholders use modeling insight on El Niño and La Niña to get ahead of potential supply challenges and use these perspectives to inform greater resilience?
Below, we examine the characteristics and implications of El Niño and La Niña for renewable energy providers and customers and how being forewarned of weather systems can have wide-ranging implications for renewable energy.
If we hope to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, global production needs to ramp up by roughly 13% per year over the next three decades.
Most of the time, the trade winds over the Pacific blow west across the equator, pushing warm water away from South U.S. and toward Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Those waters — the hottest parts of the global oceans — function as an enormous engine, pumping heat and moisture into the atmosphere over the western tropical Pacific and giving rise to exceptional thunderstorms more than 15 km tall.
But every few years, the normal interplay between the ocean and atmosphere over the tropical Pacific either speeds up or breaks down. These changes have major repercussions for weather and climate across the globe and, in certain places, can significantly affect the natural resources we depend upon to produce renewable energy. Understanding what lies ahead for the tropical Pacific could help anticipate renewable energy droughts or oversupply a season or two ahead.
Normally, the atmosphere above the Pacific forms a single loop, where air rises in the west, tracks eastward at higher altitudes, sinks back down off the coast of South U.S., and then rejoins the trade winds. When this interaction of air and ocean currents intensifies, with energized winds and even hotter water in the west, we describe this supercharged state as La Niña
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| Title | File Type | File Size |
|---|---|---|
| Predicting renewable energy droughts and surplus by modeling tropical pacific climate | .5 MB |
