  We may anticipate that climate change will bring changes to the intensity and
variability of near surface winds, either through local effects or by altering
the large-scale flow. The impact of climate change on European wind resources
has been assessed using a single-model-ensemble of the latest regional climate
model from the Rossby Centre, RCA4. These simulations used data from five of
the global climate models in the contemporary Climate Model Intercomparison
Project (CMIP5) as boundary conditions, and the results are publicly available
under the COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment (CORDEX) project.
Overall we find a consistent pattern of a decrease in the wind resources over
the European domain under both the RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 scenarios, although
there are some regions, principally North Africa and the Barents Sea, with
projected increases in wind resources. The pattern of change is both robust
across the choice of scenario, and persistent: there is a very similar pattern
of change found in the latter part of the 21st century as in the earlier. A
case study was chosen to assess the potential for offshore wind-farms in the
Black Sea region. We developed a realistic methodology for extrapolating
near-surface wind speeds up to hub-height using a time-varying roughness
length, and determined the extractable wind power at hub-height using a
realistic model of contemporary wind-turbine energy production. We demonstrate
that, unlike much of the Mediterranean basin, there is no robust pattern of a
negative climate change impact on wind resources in the studied regions of the
Black Sea. Furthermore, the seasonality of wind resources, with a strong peak
in the winter, matches well to the seasonality of energy-demand in the region,
making offshore wind-farms in the Black Sea region a viable source of energy
for neighbouring countries.
