Quantifying Climate Change Impacts on Renewable Energy Generation: A Super-Resolution Recurrent Diffusion Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a super-resolution recurrent diffusion model (SRDM) to enhance climate data resolution, enabling more accurate long-term renewable energy generation simulations under climate change scenarios.

Contribution

The study develops a novel SRDM that improves temporal resolution of climate data for renewable energy modeling, outperforming existing models in accuracy.

Findings

SRDM generates higher-resolution climate data with better accuracy than existing models.

Using low-resolution climate data introduces significant biases in renewable power estimates.

Case studies in Inner Mongolia validate SRDM's effectiveness across different climate pathways.

Abstract

Driven by global climate change and the ongoing energy transition, the coupling between power supply capabilities and meteorological factors has become increasingly significant. Over the long term, accurately quantifying the power generation of renewable energy under the influence of climate change is essential for the development of sustainable power systems. However, due to interdisciplinary differences in data requirements, climate data often lacks the necessary hourly resolution to capture the short-term variability and uncertainties of renewable energy resources. To address this limitation, a super-resolution recurrent diffusion model (SRDM) has been developed to enhance the temporal resolution of climate data and model the short-term uncertainty. The SRDM incorporates a pre-trained decoder and a denoising network, that generates long-term, high-resolution climate data through a recurrent coupling mechanism. The high-resolution climate data is then converted into power value using the mechanism model, enabling the simulation of wind and photovoltaic (PV) power generation on future long-term scales. Case studies were conducted in the Ejina region of Inner Mongolia, China, using fifth-generation reanalysis (ERA5) and coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP6) data under two climate pathways: SSP126 and SSP585. The results demonstrate that the SRDM outperforms existing generative models in generating super-resolution climate data. Furthermore, the research highlights the estimation biases introduced when low-resolution climate data is used for power conversion.