TY - JOUR
T1 - Thermal power generation is disadvantaged in a warming world
AU - Coffel, Ethan D.
AU - Mankin, Justin S.
N1 - Funding Information:
E D C received funding from the Dartmouth Neukom Institute for Computational Science and J S M from the Burke Research Initiation Award and the Neukom Institute CompX award.
Funding Information:
We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modelling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output. Support for the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project version 3 dataset is provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research (BER), by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Program Office, and by the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory Physical Sciences Division. We thank Dartmouth’s Research Computing and Discovery Cluster for computational support and the Neukom Institute for Computational Science. CPC Global Temperature data is provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSL, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their website at https://psl.noaa.gov/.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s).
PY - 2021/2
Y1 - 2021/2
N2 - Thermal power plants use fossil fuels or nuclear material to generate most of the world's electricity. On hot days, when electricity demand peaks, the ambient air and water used to cool these plants can become too warm, forcing operators to curtail electricity output. Using all available observed daily-scale plant outage data, we estimate the observed dependence of thermal plant curtailment on temperature and runoff and use this relationship to quantify curtailments due to global warming. Climate change to date has increased average thermal power plant curtailment in nuclear, coal, oil, and natural gas fired plants by 0.75-1 percentage points; with each degree Celsius of additional warming, we project curtailment to increase by 0.8-1.2 percentage points during peak demand, requiring an additional 18-27 GW of capacity, or 40-60 additional average-sized power plants, to offset this global power loss. Relative to policy scenarios with global transitions to renewable portfolios or that allow aging plants to retire, thermal power generation is a systemically disadvantaged means of electricity production in a warming world. Our results point to the crucial need for additional operational data across a diversity of thermal power plants to better constrain the risks warming poses to our electricity supply.
AB - Thermal power plants use fossil fuels or nuclear material to generate most of the world's electricity. On hot days, when electricity demand peaks, the ambient air and water used to cool these plants can become too warm, forcing operators to curtail electricity output. Using all available observed daily-scale plant outage data, we estimate the observed dependence of thermal plant curtailment on temperature and runoff and use this relationship to quantify curtailments due to global warming. Climate change to date has increased average thermal power plant curtailment in nuclear, coal, oil, and natural gas fired plants by 0.75-1 percentage points; with each degree Celsius of additional warming, we project curtailment to increase by 0.8-1.2 percentage points during peak demand, requiring an additional 18-27 GW of capacity, or 40-60 additional average-sized power plants, to offset this global power loss. Relative to policy scenarios with global transitions to renewable portfolios or that allow aging plants to retire, thermal power generation is a systemically disadvantaged means of electricity production in a warming world. Our results point to the crucial need for additional operational data across a diversity of thermal power plants to better constrain the risks warming poses to our electricity supply.
KW - Climate change
KW - Climate impacts
KW - Electricity generation curtailment
KW - Energy sector
KW - Thermoelectric power plants
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U2 - 10.1088/1748-9326/abd4a8
DO - 10.1088/1748-9326/abd4a8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85100774000
SN - 1748-9326
VL - 16
JO - Environmental Research Letters
JF - Environmental Research Letters
IS - 2
M1 - 024043
ER -