低炭素エネルギー転換下における気温極端時の化石依存と環境負荷の増幅

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🔬研究者:極端気象下の化石発電増幅と系統柔軟性の関係を定量化した実証研究として、脱炭素経路の信頼性評価に活用できる。

🏢実務担当者:再エネ調達やScope2排出量の変動リスクを理解し、蓄電池・需要応答・非化石調整力への投資判断に役立てられる。

🏛政策担当者:再エネ拡大と同時に柔軟性確保策を設計しないと極端気象時に排出・健康負荷が増すことを示し、容量市場・需給調整市場の制度設計に示唆を与える。

Climate change, driven largely by fossil fuel combustion, is making temperature extremes more frequent and more severe 1 , 2 . Cooling and heating are among the most immediate ways societies adapt to those extremes 3 , 4 , 5 , yet the resulting surge in electricity demand can raise CO₂ and air pollutant emissions and the associated health burdens 6 , 7 , 8 , feeding back into the warming that made the extremes more likely 3 , 9 . The challenge is that this adaptation is now taking place inside power systems that are simultaneously decarbonizing. Wind and solar capacity is expanding rapidly 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , but variability in their output makes reliability harder to secure 18 , 19 , and in the absence of cost-effective, carbon-free flexibility, fossil units originally built for baseload operation have increasingly served as balancing resources 20 , 21 . Extreme temperatures may therefore do more than raise demand: because thermal generation remains an important source of flexibility for meeting short-lived peaks, these events may deepen the very fossil dependence that the transition is meant to end (Fig. 1 ). Combining fuel-specific electricity generation and demand data for U.S. balancing authorities (BAs) with temperature, emissions and health-impact data, we find that daily fossil generation is, on average, 43% higher on extreme hot days and 19% higher on extreme cold days than on mild days, and the amplification is largest—not smallest—in systems with the lowest annual fossil shares, where daily CO₂ and air pollutant emissions on hot days can more than double. Fig. 1: Conceptual diagram of the linkages between climate change, extreme weather, fossil reliance, and the low-carbon energy transition. Full size image Climate change increases the occurrence of extreme weather events, and adaptation to extremes unintentionally intensifies fossil generation and reliance during weather extremes, which in turn further exacerbates climate change and air pollution. Increasing non-fossil energy (particularly variable wind and solar power) for climate mitigation increases the variability of fossil generation and inadvertently leads to greater fossil reliance under extreme weather and to high retention of installed thermal capacity, which brings about low capacity utilization rates. Energy storage, non-fossil forms of flexible energy and demand-side measures therefore need to be deployed alongside expanding wind and solar energy to avoid unintended fossil reliance, carbon and air pollution, and health burdens during extreme weather in the low-carbon energy transition.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-026-01552-zfirst seen 2026-10-09 04:46:36