Global climate change impacts onshore wind resource complementarity and temporal variability

• Evaluation of more than 33,000 onshore wind farm sites around the world. • Spatial complementarity of wind resources is scarce. • Temporal variability and spatial similarity often increases with climate change. • In China and Germany standard deviation of capacity factors remains high. • Brazil has the most favorable wind resource development under climate change. Climate change leads to spatiotemporal shifts in the global distribution of wind resources. Many studies anticipate declining mean wind speed in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, while predicting increases in mean wind speed in the tropics. However, average wind resource conditions represent only one aspect of the meteorological wind potential. The dynamics of temporal variability and spatial wind resource complementarity under climate change remain less well understood. Thus, this study aims to investigate the impact of climate change on the temporal variability of wind resources and the potential for complementary wind resource utilization. Time series of capacity factors were calculated for a global dataset of wind farm sites using an ensemble of 18 global climate models and statistical downscaling methods. The coefficient of variation was employed to assess temporal variability, while Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient was used to evaluate complementarity. The results indicate that spatial complementarity of wind resources is rare in the historical period 1989–2014. In many regions of the Northern Hemisphere the temporal variability of wind resources is increasing in the future period until 2099, while the potential for complementary wind resource utilization remains low. In China and the USA, the median of the ensemble of climate models projects a significant increase in the coefficient of variation of almost 10 % by the end of the 21st century compared to the historical period under high radiative forcing. When combined with declining average wind resources and low potential for spatial complementarity, this creates deteriorating meteorological conditions for wind energy deployment. In contrast, conditions for wind energy expansion are improving in Brazil, as average capacity factors are increasing and the coefficient of variation is declining. The findings of this study should be considered when integrating wind energy into the power system, as they are critical for energy transformation and especially for balancing electricity supply and demand.