Assessment of wind and wave energy in China seas under climate change based on CMIP6 climate model

With the intensification of global warming, the distribution of marine renewable energy resources are changing. In this study, the wind and wave energy resources in the coastal waters of China under four combined climate change scenarios and the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), namely SSP126, SSP245, SSP370, and SSP585 are investigated. The wind data from the latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) climate model is analyzed with Multi-model ensemble (MME) approach, which is consequently used to generate the wave data by the FVCOM-SWAVE wave model for historical conditions (2000–2014) and further climate scenarios (2080–2100). The impact of the climate change scenarios on the wind and wave energy generation performance is also assessed using the Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) index. The results indicate that with the increase of the greenhouse gas emissions, the wind energy increases in the northern South China Sea, the Bohai Sea and the Yellow Sea, and the wave energy increases in the Bohai Sea, the Yellow Sea and the northern South China Sea, while a slight decrease is found in the southern South China Sea. The performance of the wind and wave energy generation is affected by the future climate change scenarios, where the wind energy generation is found to be more stable than the wave energy at the study site. The results from this study provide useful guidance for the future deployment of wind and wave energy in the China's coastal waters.