Translating the internal climate variability from climate variables to hydropower production

TL;DR

This study quantifies how internal climate variability and model uncertainty influence hydropower production estimates in India, highlighting the importance of considering internal variability for future energy planning under climate change.

Contribution

It uniquely assesses the impact of internal climate variability on hydropower projections using ensemble models and hydrological simulations, emphasizing the need to incorporate this variability in energy security strategies.

Findings

ICV significantly affects streamflow and hydropower estimates.

Model uncertainty exceeds ICV in total uncertainty but ICV increases in far-term projections.

Bias correction does not preserve internal variability in streamflow estimates.

Abstract

Quantifying uncertainties in estimating future hydropower production directly or indirectly affects India's energy security, planning, and management. The chaotic and nonlinear nature of atmospheric processes results in considerable Internal Climate Variability (ICV) for future projections of climate variables. Multiple Initial Condition Ensembles (MICE) and Multi-Model Ensembles (MME) are often used to analyze the role of ICV and model uncertainty in precipitation and temperature. However, there are limited studies focusing on quantifying the role of internal variability on impact variables, including hydropower production. In this study, we analyze the role of ICV and model uncertainty on three prominent hydropower plants of India using MICE of EC-Earth3 and MME from CMIP6. We estimate the streamflow projections for all ensembles using the Variable Infiltration Capacity hydrological model for four time periods, historical, near, mid and far-term. We estimate maximum hydropower production generated using monthly release and hydraulic head available at the reservoir. We also analyzed the role of bias correction in hydropower production. The results show that ICV plays a significant role in estimating streamflow and hydropower estimation for monsoon and throughout the year, respectively. Model uncertainty contributes more to total uncertainty than ICV in estimating the streamflow and potential hydropower. However, ICV is increasing towards the far-term. We also show that bias correction does not preserve the internal variability in estimating the streamflow. Although there is an increase in uncertainty for estimated streamflow, mean hydropower shows the decrease towards the far-term for February to May, more prominent for MICE than MME. The results suggest a need to incorporate uncertainty due to internal variability for addressing power security in changing climate scenarios.