Addressing impact of climate change on wind and solar energy infrastructures: the case of India

In the first part of this thesis, the comparison of two families of CORDEX suggests the improved performance of the latest version in reproducing the local climate. The results indicate increasing future trends for annual wind speeds in the north-west (+0.04m/s per decade (±8%)), the center (0.03 m/s per decade ( ±11%$)), and the east (+0.02 m/s per decade (±19%)) of the Indian sub-continent under the RCP 8.5 scenario at the end of the century, with changes occurring more substantially during the last 30 years of the period. Furthermore, future projections also display seasonal wind perturbations occurring during the pre-monsoon, and trends with the highest magnitude concentrating during the monsoon. When combining wind and solar assets in a portfolio, we find that the uncertainty reduction level on the energy production ranges from 33% to 50% when compared to pure wind-only portfolios and from 30% to 96% when compared to pure solar assets. The analysis undertaken in the last part of the thesis demonstrates that the new Wind-Topo improves the estimation at stations located in the Himalayan mountains. Overall, the mean bias error is reduced and the correlation increased.