Climate scenarios of wind and solar resources in the 2040-2070 period for use by the NREL ReEDS model

The Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is a model designed to analyze the long-term impact of electric power generation technologies and transmission infrastructure throughout the contiguous United States. One of its capabilities relevant to the new energy economy is to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of renewable energy sources and the sensitivity of the power grid to variability and uncertainty, both regionally and temporally, in wind and solar power resources. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has developed current (1985-2006) and future (2040-2070) climate scenarios for use as input to NREL's ReEDS model to explore the changes in mean renewable resource and its inter-annual variability. Results from the input data set analysis will be presented.