Infrastructure & Investment

Impacts on Resources and Climate of Projected Economic and Population Growth Patterns

Global economic and population growth are driving energy, land, and water use, and there are complex connections between the use of these resources and the world’s climate and natural environment. A significant engineering challenge is to develop and deploy technologies that reduce human impact on the environment and make better use of resources while remaining robust in the face of unavoidable environmental change. Without significant changes in resource use patterns, projections indicate that fossil fuel use will continue to rise, more land will be converted for crops, and water stress will increase in many areas already subject to water shortages.

Even in the absence of climate and environmental change, these trends would lead to stress on water resources and natural systems as well as temperature increases of 3°C to as much as 8°C depending on the region and climate sensitivity. Higher global temperatures would be associated with an overall increase in global precipitation (because a warmer climate speeds up the hydrological cycle, meaning more evaporation and more precipitation), but water runoff in many already water-stressed areas could be reduced, contributing to further water stress, with consequences for energy and food production.

This short paper presents a review of several key aspects of current global development to quantitatively describe how economic development drives energy, land, and water use and how the use of these resources may affect climate and the availability of resources.

© 2015 National Academy of Engineering

Implications of high renewable electricity penetration in the U.S. for water use, greenhouse gas emissions, land-use, and materials supply

Recent work found that renewable energy could supply 80% of electricity demand in the contiguous United States in 2050 at the hourly level. This paper explores some of the implications of achieving such high levels of renewable electricity for supply chains and the environment in scenarios with renewable supply up to such levels. Expanding the renewable electricity supply at this scale by 2050 implies annual capacity additions of roughly 20 gigawatts per year (GW/year) over the next decade, rising to roughly 40 GW/year from 2040 to 2050. Given total 2012 renewable electricity capacity additions of slightly more than 16 GW, this suggests moderate growth of the related supply chains, averaging overall roughly 4% annual growth to 2040. Transitioning to high renewable electricity supply would lead to significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and water use, with only modest land-use implications. While renewable energy expansion implies moderate growth of the renewable electricity supply chains, no insurmountable long-term constraints to renewable electricity technology manufacturing capacity or materials supply are identified.

© 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

Modeling Water Withdrawal and Consumption for Electricity Generation in the United States

Water withdrawals for thermoelectric cooling account for a significant portion of total water use in the United States. Any change in electrical energy generation policy and technologies has the potential to have a major impact on the management of local and regional water resources. In this report, a model of Withdrawal and Consumption for Thermo-electric Systems (WiCTS) is formalized. This empirically-based framework employs specific water-use rates that are scaled according to energy production, and thus, WiTCS is able to estimate regional water withdrawals and consumption for any electricity generation portfolio. These terms are calculated based on water withdrawal and consumption data taken from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) inventories and a recent NREL report. To illustrate the model capabilities, we assess the impact of a high-penetration of renewable electricity-generation technologies on water withdrawals and consumption in the United States. These energy portfolio scenarios are taken from the Renewable Energy Futures (REF) calculations performed by The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Results of the model indicate that significant reductions in water use are achieved under the renewable technology portfolio. Further experiments illustrate additional capabilities of the model. We investigate the impacts of assuming geothermal and concentrated solar power technologies employing wet cooling systems versus dry as well as assuming all wet cooling technologies use closed cycle cooling technologies. Results indicate that water consumption and withdrawals increase under the first assumption, and that water consumption increases under the second assumption while water withdrawals decrease.

Report Summary
 

Analysis of coastal protection under rising flood risk

Infrastructure located along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts is exposed to rising risk of flooding from sea level rise, increasing storm surge, and subsidence. In these circumstances coastal management commonly based on 100-year flood maps assuming current climatology is no longer adequate. A dynamic programming cost–benefit analysis is applied to the adaptation decision, illustrated by application to an energy facility in Galveston Bay. Projections of several global climate models provide inputs to estimates of the change in hurricane and storm surge activity as well as the increase in sea level. The projected rise in physical flood risk is combined with estimates of flood damage and protection costs in an analysis of the multi-period nature of adaptation choice. The result is a planning method, using dynamic programming, which is appropriate for investment and abandonment decisions under rising coastal risk.

© the authors 2015

The Association of Large-Scale Climate Variability and Teleconnections on Wind Energy Resource over Europe and its Intermittency

In times of increasing importance of wind power in the world’s energy mix, this study focuses on a better understanding of the influences of large-scale climate variability on wind power resource over Europe. The impact of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the Arctic Oscillation (AO), the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) are investigated in terms of their correlation with wind power density (WPD) at 80 m hub height. These WPDs are calculated based on the MERRA Reanalysis data set covering 31 years of measurements. Not surprisingly, AO and NAO are highly correlated with the time series of WPD. This correlation can also be found in the first principal component of a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of WPD over Europe explaining 14% of the overall variation. Further, cross-correlation analyses indicates the strongest associated variations are achieved with AO/NAO leading WPD by at most one day. Furthermore, the impact of high and low phases of the respective oscillations has been assessed to provide a more comprehensive illustration. The fraction of WPD for high and low AO/NAO increases considerably for northern Europe, whereas the opposite pattern can be observed for southern Europe. Similar results are obtained by calculating the energy output of three hypothetical wind turbines for every grid point over Europe. Thus, we identified a high interconnection potential between wind farms in order to reduce intermittency, one of the primary challenges in wind power generation. In addition, we observe significant correlations between WPD and AMO.

Characterization of the Solar Power Resource in Europe and Assessing Benefits of Co-Location with Wind Power Installations

The extent, availability and reliability of solar power generation are assessed over Europe, and—following a previously developed methodology—special attention is given to the intermittency of solar power. Combined with estimates of wind power resource over Europe from a companion assessment, we assess the benefits of co-location of solar and wind power installations, particularly with respect to aggregate power generation and local mitigation of intermittency. Consistent with previous studies, our results show that the majority of solar potential is found in southern Europe, which also displays the strongest availability. We also found that higher latitude locations, around central Europe, benefit from medium to high solar power during the warm season. If a region’s availability of solar power is sufficient—as determined by a minimum technological threshold for photovoltaic extraction— it possesses the potential to reduce intermittency by aggregation and interconnection. We find these conditions occurring to a moderate extent over mainland central Europe. Finally, the result of co location of wind and solar power is increased power availability over the whole continent, especially in central Europe where neither resource is strong. In terms of local intermittency mitigation, the regions that benefit most are the Mediterranean and Baltic countries.

The Potential Wind Power Resource in Australia: A New Perspective

Australia’s wind resource is considered to be very good, and the utilization of this renewable energy resource is increasing rapidly: wind power installed capacity increased by 35% from 2006 to 2011 and is predicted to account for over 12% of Australia’s electricity generation in 2030. Due to this growth in the utilization of the wind resource and the increasing importance of wind power in Australia’s energy mix, this study sets out to analyze and interpret the nature of Australia’s wind resources using robust metrics of the abundance, variability and intermittency of wind power density, and analyzes the variation of these characteristics with current and potential wind turbine hub heights. We also assess the extent to which wind intermittency, on hourly or greater timescales, can potentially be mitigated by the aggregation of geographically dispersed wind farms, and in so doing, lessen the severe impact on wind power economic viability of long lulls in wind and power generated. Our results suggest that over much of Australia, areas that have high wind intermittency coincide with large expanses in which the aggregation of turbine output does not mitigate variability. These areas are also geographically remote, some are disconnected from the east coast’s electricity grid and large population centers, which are factors that could decrease the potential economic viability of wind farms in these locations. However, on the eastern seaboard, even though the wind resource is weaker, it is less variable, much closer to large population centers, and there exists more potential to mitigate it’s intermittency through aggregation. This study forms a necessary precursor to the analysis of the impact of large-scale circulations and oscillations on the wind resource at the mesoscale.

© 2014 Hallgren et al.

Pages

Subscribe to Infrastructure & Investment