Understanding the impacts of droughts and heatwaves on global energy production and associated GHG emissions, and potential feedbacks with climate.

Project Rationale:

Power generation is highly dependent on water resources, either directly from hydropower (16% of global production) or via cooling of thermoelectric power plants (70% globally), and therefore subject to reductions during droughts and heatwaves. Recent work has evaluated this globally [1] showing reduced production by up to 10% during historic regional droughts. With climate change induced regional drought increases, this is likely to become more problematic in the future, and particularly in the developing world where there are major investments in hydropower (50-70% increase by 2040). Other recent work [2] has shown that, for the Western US, drought induced power curtailing leads to switching to natural gas and imports of fossil fuel based production with increases in GHG emissions of up to 15%, with implications for meeting emissions targets. Despite its significance, little is known about how production and emissions are impacted globally and under future climates and energy policies such as the EU Energy Union Strategy, and the environmental impacts via changes in river flows and temperatures. The aim of this project is to make first estimates of the global impact of drought/heatwave induced power curtailing and the associated enhanced emissions and environmental impacts under historic and future scenarios.

Methodology:

The approach will be based on the development of detailed coupled hydrology-energy model simulations of hydrological variability and power plant production/emissions. The modelling will couple the VIC hydrological model to the very high-resolution RAPID river model [3], and using the global power plant database from [1]. This will be enhanced to include the latest World Resources Institute database of power plant development, operational rules, environmental flow regulations, and emission estimates. This will be the first spatially explicit modelling of coupled water resources-power generation globally, which is required to understand the impact of local scale, but high capacity, power generation. Research will be undertaken to estimate potential power switching based on electricity network data. The model will be run historically to understand the impact of regional droughts/heatwaves on power generation and environmental flows/temperatures which can impact aquatic habitats. Simulations will also be developed under different policy scenarios, including current national level policies to meet Paris Agreement commitments, to understand the potential for feedbacks with climate. This approach will allow for the first time, the estimation of drought/heatwave induced regional emissions historically and under future climates, and explore plausible pathways to meeting power generation emissions targets in selected case studies.

Training:

The INSPIRE DTP programme provides comprehensive personal and professional development training alongside extensive opportunities for students to expand their multi-disciplinary outlook through interactions with a wide network of academic, research and industrial/policy partners. The student will be registered at the University of Southampton and hosted at University of Southampton.

Specific training will include:
- hydrological and power plant modelling
- large climate/hydrological dataset processing and analysis
- high performance computing and parallel processing
- development of climate and policy scenarios, and associated model experiments