Exploring the Effects of Climate Change and Technological Innovation on the Robust Design of Off-grid Hybrid Energy Systems

Small islands represent a paradigmatic example of remote off-grid systems facing a large number of sustainability issues, mainly due to their distance from the mainland, the lack of accessible water sources, and the high seasonal variability of both water and electricity demand. Energy security is generally reliant on carbon intensive diesel generators, which are usually oversized to meet peak summer electricity demand driven by high touristic fluxes. Potable water is often produced by energy intensive desalination technologies, which strongly impact on the electricity system, increasing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions . In addition, the high dependence upon the remote supply of fuel and the need for backup storage to cover possible refuelling delays contribute to increasing operational costs and the overall inefficiency of these systems.

In order to improve the economic and environmental sustainability of small islands, hybrid energy systems, which combine traditional power generation (e.g., diesel) with renewable energy sources (e.g., PV, wind) and storage technologies, provide a potentially viable solution for reducing costs and carbon emissions.

However, climate change and rapid technological innovation is likely to pose significant challenges to the identification of the optimal hybrid energy system able to guarantee high levels of sustainability over a medium-to long-term horizon. This is because future climate conditions, as well as costs and the efficiency of relevant technologies, are likely to be the main factors affecting future system performance.

In this work, we account for the deep uncertainty in both climate drivers (i.e., wind speed, solar radiation) and technological variables (i.e., cost and efficiency of the technologies) by assessing the robustness of different hybrid system designs with respect to a large set of plausible future scenarios. In particular, we explore how hybrid system designs are vulnerable to co-varying climate and technological future conditions, evaluating system performance according to different robustness metrics, which reflect different levels of risk aversion of the decision maker.

Expected results focus on identifying the key drivers that have a more significant impact on system performance, and exploring the dependency of the best system design on the choice of robustness metric.