The integration of renewable energy sources into power systems is expected to
increase significantly in the coming decades. This can result in critical
situations related to the strong variability in space and time of weather
patterns. During these critical situations the power system experiences a
structural shortage of energy across multiple time steps and regions, leading
to Energy Not Served (ENS) events. Our research explores the relationship
between six weather regimes that describe the large scale atmospheric flow and
ENS events in Europe by simulating future power systems. Our results indicate
that most regions have a specific weather regime that leads to the highest
number of ENS events. However, ENS events can still occur during any weather
regime, but with a lower probability.
In particular, our findings show that ENS events in western and central
European countries often coincide with either the positive Scandinavian
Blocking (SB+), characterised by cold air penetrating Europe under calm weather
conditions from north-eastern regions, or North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO+)
weather regime, characterised by westerly flow and cold air in the southern
half of Europe. Additionally, we found that the relative impact of one of these
regimes reaches a peak 10 days before ENS events in these countries. In
Scandinavian and Baltic countries, on the other hand, our results indicate that
the relative prevalence of the negative Atlantic Ridge (AR-) weather regime is
higher during and leading up to the ENS event.Comment: Rogier H. Wuijts and Laurens P. Stoop contributed equally to this
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