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The electricity sector is currently considered mainly on the emission side of the climate change equation. In order to limit climate warming to below 2 °C, or even 1.5 °C, it must undergo a rapid transition towards carbon neutral production by the mid-century. Simultaneously, electricity generating technologies will be vulnerable to climate change. Here, we assess the impacts of climate change on wind, solar photovoltaic, hydro and thermoelectric power generation in Europe using a consistent modelling approach across the different technologies. We compare the impacts for different global warming scenarios: +1.5 °C, +2 °C and +3 °C. Results show that climate change has negative impacts on electricity production in most countries and for most technologies. Such impacts remain limited for a 1.5 °C warming, and roughly double for a 3 °C warming. Impacts are relatively limited for solar photovoltaic and wind power potential which may reduce up to 10%, while hydropower and thermoelectric generation may decrease by up to 20%. Generally, impacts are more severe in southern Europe than in northern Europe, inducing inequity between EU countries. We show that a higher share of renewables could reduce the vulnerability of power generation to climate change, although the variability of wind and solar PV production remains a significant challenge.

It is well known that short-term (i.e. interannual) variations in fossil-fuel CO _2 emissions are closely related to the evolution of the national economies. Nevertheless, a fraction of the CO _2 emissions are linked to domestic and business heating and cooling, which can be expected to be related to the meteorology, independently of the economy. Here, we analyse whether the signature of the inter-annual temperature anomalies is discernible in the time series of CO _2 emissions at the country scale. Our analysis shows that, for many countries, there is a clear positive correlation between a heating-degree-person index and the component of the CO _2 emissions that is not explained by the economy as quantified by the gross domestic product (GDP). Similarly, several countries show a positive correlation between a cooling-degree-person (CDP) index and CO _2 emissions. The slope of the linear relationship for heating is on the order of 0.5–1 kg CO _2 (degree-day-person) ^−1 but with significant country-to-country variations. A similar relationship for cooling shows even greater diversity. We further show that the inter-annual climate anomalies have a small but significant impact on the annual growth rate of CO _2 emissions, both at the national and global scale. Such a meteorological effect was a significant contribution to the rather small and unexpected global emission growth rate in 2014 while its contribution to the near zero emission growth in 2015 was insignificant.