Quantization of Climate Change Impacts on Renewable Energy Generation Capacity: A Super-Resolution Recurrent Diffusion Model

Driven by global climate change and the ongoing energy transition, the coupling between power supply capabilities and meteorological factors has become increasingly significant. Over the long term, accurately quantifying the power generation capacity of renewable energy under the influence of climate change is essential for the development of sustainable power systems. However, due to interdisciplinary differences in data requirements, climate data often lacks the necessary hourly resolution to capture the short-term variability and uncertainties of renewable energy resources. To address this limitation, a super-resolution recurrent diffusion model (SRDM) has been developed to enhance the temporal resolution of climate data and model the short-term uncertainty. The SRDM incorporates a pre-trained decoder and a denoising network, that generates long-term, high-resolution climate data through a recurrent coupling mechanism. The high-resolution climate data is then converted into power value using the mechanism model, enabling the simulation of wind and photovoltaic (PV) power generation capacity on future long-term scales. Case studies were conducted in the Ejina region of Inner Mongolia, China, using fifth-generation reanalysis (ERA5) and coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP6) data under two climate pathways: SSP126 and SSP585. The results demonstrate that the SRDM outperforms existing generative models in generating super-resolution climate data. For the Ejina region, under a high-emission pathway, the annual utilization hours of wind power are projected to decrease by 2.82 hours/year, while those for PV power are projected to decrease by 0.26 hours/year. Furthermore, the research highlights the estimation biases introduced when low-resolution climate data is used for power conversion.