Yeah it baffles me how much of my money the trains take compared to the cost of my commute if I drove :(
Maybe I need to get into cycling up the A1...

Our rapidly changing climate means it is of key importance that climate scientists continue to work with energy system modellers to develop best practices for stress testing highly weather-sensitive future power systems and this report continues to make progress towards this goal.

Using the UK Met Office's UK Climate Projections (UKCP18) We can see the anticipated changes in energy system composition have a much larger impact on management of the future energy system than near-term climate change.

We also modelled 28 European countries for the present day climate, and can see that while GB is experiencing its most extreme short-duration stress events, it is common for interconnected countries to also be experiencing times of high need.

Overall, the amount of non-renewable energy the system needs to find (the difference between demand and renewable generation) will decrease in future power systems, given the expected expansion of renewables capacity. But they're not generating consistently through the year, so balancing is needed.

The energy system will become more weather-sensitive over time, due to the electrification of the economy and the rapid increases in wind and solar generation. Despite this, there will likely remain periods of low renewables generation, which will require low-carbon flexibility solutions to manage.

We had three types of challenging event, a short-duration stress event (a few days of high demand and low renewables, driven by a low wind cold snap) a challenging year (where generally demand is higher and renewable generation is lower, and a multi-year challenge.

In this project I used time series of demand, wind and solar power for now, mid-2030s and 2050 to think about weather-driven stress on power systems for a present climate and for some future warming scenarios.

Thanks Chris! There's always next time 🙃