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Add to Preferred SourcesThe new IAEA publication Adapting the Energy Sector to Climate Change explores the diverse range of impacts on the energy sector resulting from gradual climate change and extreme weather events, and the potential ways to counter them. Adequate responses to these challenges are crucial for secure and reliable energy supply, including nuclear energy.
“Increased global and regional temperatures patterns, changes in precipitation amounts and seasonal distribution, a sea-level rise, and changing characteristics of various extreme events such as increasing frequency, intensity, duration or even spatial extent of heatwaves, droughts and storms, are forecast by most global and regional climate models,” said Loreta Stankeviciute, an IAEA energy systems analyst.
These changes are expected to have a considerable impact on the energy supply chain – and are discussed in this publication. The energy resource base, extraction and transport of depletable energy sources, power generation, transmission and distribution could all be impacted.
The topics addressed include examples of direct and indirect impacts of climate trends, extreme events such as icy rain that can directly damage solar panels, wind turbines, and transmission lines. In contrast, low precipitation and the resulting low water level in a river may disrupt the operations of a coal power plant, because coal could not be delivered to the plant.
Another example of indirect effect is when a snowstorm disrupts power transmission lines and forces an otherwise intact nuclear power plant to shut down because it cannot transmit electricity to the grid.
“Enumerating and analysing these impacts and then increasing the adaptive capacity in specific components of the energy sector will make the energy supply more secure,” Stankeviciute said.
This publication includes three case studies which assess the energy sector’s vulnerability in Argentina, Pakistan and Slovenia. The studies were part of a three-year IAEA Coordinated Research Project on Technoeconomic Evaluation of Options for Adapting Nuclear and Other Energy Infrastructure to Long Term Climate Change and Extreme Weather.
Read and download the publication: Adapting the Energy Sector to Climate Change.
Original source: IAEA
Published on 06 November 2019