The energy sector in Brazil faces challenges with regards to climate change as well as energy security. As renewable sources such as wind, solar, and hydropower expand, it becomes crucial to understand the resources and their variations over time to assign a generation capacity credit for long-term energy planning. The improvement of wind resource knowledge by the Energy Research Company (EPE) is a continuous process. Studies based on the Wind Measurement Monitoring System (AMA) are particularly important as they provide detailed information about the wind behavior in the Northeast and South regions of Brazil, specifically where the winning wind energy projects are located. As the wind source gains importance in the national energy matrix, it is necessary to better understand its behavior regarding availability in time and space, and whether its behavior will continue to be consistent with the historical data or if there will be changes resulting from climate change. Therefore, a study that verifies the behavior of the wind source in relation to climatic aspects, in global, mesoscale, and microscale, is of great relevance.
The main activities to be developed in study are: reviewing literature on the meteorological systems in Brazil, their variability in different scales of time and space, and their impacts on the availability of solar and wind resources; gathering and qualifying observed data of wind and solar radiation available in different databases; organizing a consolidated observational database in monthly scale from the combination of reanalysis sets and surface measurements; descriptive statistical analysis using: (i) the outputs of climate models; (ii) the consolidated observational database for wind speed at 10 m above the surface (and 50 m when available); and (iii) data of solar radiation incident on the surface. The development of a statistical refinement methodology for removing systematic errors in the monthly scale estimates of solar radiation and wind produced by climate models is also carried out. This correction is necessary because while climate models provide consistent simulations for large scale phenomena, they require local refinement to better represent observations.
The results of this study then fed into the National Energy Plan for 2050: PNE Plano Nacional de Energia 2050
