The second CES Workshop, held at SMHI in Norrköping, Sweden, May 2008
50 participants took part in the three-day workshop, which was overall very successful. A half-day Steering Group meeting was held subsequent to the workshop where the PIs of the working groups and the representatives from the energy sector met and discussed logistics and financial matters in more detail.
The main objective of the CES workshop was to report the progress of the individual working groups and to identify the interactions and flow of information within the project. The participants also revisited the implementation plan including timeline and deliverables for the individual working groups.
The Climate Scenarios group is working on the extension of long observational time series of temperature, precipitation and runoff to 2050. New time series for the Baltic countries will be developed within CES project. Statistical downscaling and adjustment of RCM-output to local climate conditions will be applied for selected Nordic sub-regions, going from 25 km to ~1 km horizontal resolution. The Climate Scenarios group asked for input from other groups on which areas should be used in the downscaling process. Customized regional climate scenarios for risks analyses will also be produced in cooperation with the Risk Assessment working group.
Hydropower, hydrology group and the Hydropower, snow and ice group will use the climate scenarios and work together on method for modelling changes in glacier covered areas. The hydrology group will perform an analysis of dam safety in a changed climate. Another common interest for all countries is future changes in the hydropower potential. The results of the hydrological models will be delivered to the Energy Systems, Risk Analysis and Statistical Analysis groups.
The Statistical Analysis group will use the climate scenerios and the results of the hydrological models to assess the variability in climate and hydrology in the past and the future. The group will focus on extremes, uncertainty and effect on the energy sector and study changes in flood frequency, variability in extreme events and dam safety.
The Wind Energy group will provide an extreme wind atlas of the Nordic countries, with 50-year wind in 100 m height for structural design. The group will also develop a model of sea-state to estimate fair-weather windows for offshore wind farms and conduct a forecasts of the most probable developments of the Nordic electricity system for the next 20-30 years, taking into account the most recent information regarding climate change.
The Energy System group will focus on providing a forecast on how the energy system will look like in 2020, and how the demand for electricity will change until 2020. The group will deploy a model on fuel prices, economic and technological development, and CO2 prices.
In the CES project methods for sophisticated risk analysis accounting for climate change will be explored by the Risk Analysis group. The Risk group will use climate scenarios to assess risk in the nearest future taking climate changes into account.
All participants in the CES project have access to a project web-page for information dissemination within the project. The web has been organized with a workspace for each group to communicate and each workshop has it's own workspace as well. The next step will be to establish a metadata access in order to bring together information on data used in the CES project. The metadata platform will contain information on the data produced in the project, which will help preparing the data for public access on the official web page of the project, www.os.is/ces. One of the challenges in the project is to bridge the gap between scientists and corporate planners. The question is how can the scientific results be put to end use? The prediction of future climate scenarios should be utilized to develop business strategies for decisions on future development and for estimation of the impacts on the existing installations. Within the CES project joint case studies will be created where the procedures and the results developed are used for decision making for the electricity companies. The workshops within the CES project are a venue for the groups to work together on specific problems. It is evident that the cooperation between different scientific fields is fundamental to improve the quality of the research and to gain extensive understanding of the impacts of climate change on the energy systems. (06.06.2008)
