Develop a framework to account energy-climate interactions

[ekatef]

Describe the feature you'd like to see

The energy transition is aimed to reduce anthropogenic influence on the climate system while the climate in it's turn impacts the power systems and the energy sector in general. As discussed with @davide-f, the PyPSA-Earth/PyPSA-Earth-Sec gives an opportunity to look into the energy-climate loop in details provided there is a framework to connect the energy model with the climate side.

As a first approximation we may assume that the "main" loop would be temperature -> demand -> power system design -> emissions -> temperature. The climate conditions are effected by the integral (over time) of the emissions, which hence affect the optimization on the fly. Thus, an iterative approach is needed to adjust the yearly weather according to an external function.

A computation procedure could be as the following:

1. Initialize an initial scenario path* representing a typical meteorological year from 2020 to 2050
2. Run PyPSA-Earth and estimate the need for the energy demand and emission for the entire energy sector
3. Calculate the emissions and eventually other relevant parameters
4. Run climate calculations to estimate the climate inputs for etc for the new path
5. Run PyPSA-Earth with the updated weather scenarios
6. Compare the results obtained now with the previous iterations; if changes are limited, then stop, otherwise go back to 3

*A scenario is a complete set of weather years covering the entire horizon under interest, given preset conditions of emissions

A reasonable first approximation to build climate inputs for the point 1 seems to be:

• account only for the temperature changes among all the climate factors (it should be fine for wind and solar but it may result to some issues for hydro power in some regions);
• build temperature projections for each of the macro-regions/spatial clusters considered by the model (as time series for 2020 to 2050) for each of the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs)
• implement bias-corrections and/or morphing approach to ensure that the projected temperature profiles work well for for the required temporal/spatial resolution

Regarding point 4, it could be a proper approach to interpolate between temperature profiles corresponding to different SSP scenarios for accounting emissions departure from the standard SSP path.

@davide-f, thank you so much for the discussion. Will be grateful for your comments and corrections.

[davide-f]

Issue #9 provides some additional insights. Worth checking when addressing this topic