2024,22(5):1029-1040, DOI:
Abstract:
Water, wind, and solar energy are essential components of clean energy. Water energy resources are widely distributed, with mature development and utilization technology and low economic cost, and they have been widely applied and developed around the world. Wind and solar energy resources also have the characteristics of abundant reserves, wide distribution, and no pollution. They have developed rapidly in recent years and become essential directions for the development of renewable energy. Global climate change is one of the problems that has huge influence on the world. Water, wind, and solar energy are directly related to climate variables such as precipitation, temperature, wind speed, and radiation. At present, few studies comprehensively summarize and compare the impacts of climate change on water energy resources, wind energy resources, and solar energy resources in China.
The commonly used indicators and evaluation methods for water, wind, and solar energy resources were summarized. It also summarizes the impacts of climate change on these resources in the historical period and their changes under different climate change scenarios in the future across China were also summarized.
The main evaluation indicators of water energy resources include theoretical reserves, technical exploitability, economic exploitability, already developed and under development amount, hydropower generation, gross hydropower potential, developed hydropower potential and river runoff. The main evaluation indicators of wind energy resources include average wind speed, wind direction frequency, wind power density, effective hours, turbulence intensity, wind energy content, and technical exploitability. The main evaluation indicators of solar energy resources include abundance, stability, direct ratio, solar radiation, and sunshine duration. In summary, the evaluation of water energy resources, wind energy resources, and solar energy resources could adopt evaluation methods based on observation data, numerical model simulation results, satellite remote sensing products, and reanalysis data. Water energy, wind energy, and solar energy are significantly affected by climate change. In most of previous studies, the total amounts of water energy resources were projected to increase, and wind energy resources and solar energy resources were projected to decrease generally, with spatial-temporal heterogeneity, in the future. Climate change would affect the development and utilization of renewable energy, dominated by water, wind, and solar energy.
To cope with the adverse impacts of climate change, the following three frontier topics are suggested to be focused on in the future. First, research on the evaluation indicators of water, wind, and solar energy resources should be further conducted to form a unified evaluation standard under the changing climate. Second, the primary database of clean energy resources evaluation and the universal software used for resources evaluation should be constructed to improve the digital intelligence level of the power system. Third, the accurate and comprehensive evaluation of water energy resources, wind energy resources, and solar energy resources under the changing climate in the future and the medium and long-term forecasting of hydropower, wind power, and solar power generation should be further studied, which could improve the accuracy of resources evaluation and medium and long-term forecasting.