The report presents developments and applications of the SPOPSI (Stochastic POwer Profile SImulator) procedure, aimed at the stochastic generation of synthetic series of wind, photovoltaic and load power to be used by probabilistic tools based on Monte Carlo simulation, for the evaluation of adequacy indices and other techno-economic indices in support of electricity system planning. SPOPSI starts by analysing time series and modelling the dependence of power on meteorological variables.

The newly generated series maintain the statistical properties of the original series but have different hourly values, as required by Monte Carlo iterations. The report describes, in particular:

1) climate data processing. Having chosen the emission paths RCP8.5, RCP4.5, RCP2.6, which assume zero, moderate and significant greenhouse gas emission reductions respectively, a number of Euro-CORDEX models are selected, which provide forecasts about temperature, wind speed and solar radiation; these forecasts are bias-corrected against the historical data retrieved from the MERIDA HRES reanalysis dataset and then aggregated, based on appropriate evaluations, on a regional and daily (photovoltaic case) or monthly (wind power case) basis, to be passed as input to SPOPSI;

2) an application of SPOPSI_wind, in which the relationship between historical wind producibility and the meteorological variables of temperature and wind speed was evolved, to better take into account climate changes. The application to data for 2050 and 2100 shows that producibility would not significantly change as the hypothesized emission path changes, that’s because large-scale changes in wind speed are not expected due to climate change;

3) the evolution of SPOPSI_sun to model the relationship between photovoltaic producibility and the variables of temperature and solar radiation. The application to a test case showed that the series generated by SPOPSI_sun retain the statistical properties of the time series, presenting different time profiles as required by Monte Carlo simulations;

4) the assessment of the impact of climate change on photovoltaic producibility, by comparing the series generated by SPOPSI_sun from climate projections of the models in three emission paths. The “optimistic” RCP2.6 emission pathway was found to have the highest producibility in 2050 and even more in 2100, while the “pessimistic” RCP8.5 pathway is the one with the lowest producibility: this is explained by the fact that increased temperatures will reduce the efficiency of systems.

The Report is available on the Italian site