Potential impacts of climate change on renewable energy in Egypt

Abstract The need for renewable energy sources is recently necessitated by attaining sustainability and climate change mitigation. Accordingly, the use of renewable energy sources has been growing rapidly during the last two decades. Yet, the potentials of renewable energy sources are generally influenced by several climatic factors that either determine the source of energy such as wind speed in the case of wind power or affect the performance of system such as the reduction in solar PV power production due to temperature increase. This highlights the need for assessing climate change impacts on renewable energy sources in the future to ensure their reliability and sustainability. This paper is intended to assess impacts of climate change on wind and solar potential energy in Egypt by the year 2065 under RCP 8.5 scenario. For this purpose, a GIS-based methodology of three main steps was applied. The results revealed that solar energy potential in Egypt is expected to be relatively less vulnerable to climate change compared to wind energy. In this respect, it was found that while wind energy potential was estimated to range ± 12%. By the year 2065 under RCP 8.5 scenario, PV module power is expected to decrease by about 1.3% on average. Such assessment can assist in developing more sustainable and flexible renewable energy policy in Egypt.