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Prolonged wind droughts in a warming climate threaten global wind power security

Nature Climate Change volume 15, pages 842–849 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Prolonged low-wind events, termed wind droughts, threaten wind turbine electricity generation, yet their future trajectories remain poorly understood. Here, using hourly data from 21 IPCC models, we reveal robust increasing trends in wind drought duration at both global and regional scales by 2100, across low- and high-CO2 scenarios. These trends are primarily driven by declining mid-latitude cyclone frequencies and Arctic warming. Notably, the duration of 25-year return events is projected to increase by up to 20% under low warming scenarios and 40% under very high warming scenarios in northern mid-latitude countries, threatening energy security in these densely populated areas. Additionally, record-breaking wind drought extremes will probably become more frequent in a warming climate, particularly in eastern North America, western Russia, northeastern China and north-central Africa. Our analysis suggests that ~20% of existing wind turbines are in regions at high future risk of record-breaking wind drought extremes, a factor not yet considered in current assessments.

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Fig. 1: Reported wind droughts worldwide in the past decades and definition of wind droughts.
Fig. 2: Changes in WDF and duration from 2015 to 2100.
Fig. 3: Drivers of future changes in WDD.
Fig. 4: Record-breaking wind droughts.
Fig. 5: Current wind turbines locations and their future risk of RWD.

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Data availability

All the data used in this study are available online via the following links. The data for quantifying wind drought changes are available via the ERA5 at https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.adbb2d47 (ref. 66) and the MERRA2 at https://doi.org/10.5067/VJAFPLI1CSIV (ref. 67). Projected wind drought changes in CMIP6 are available at the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (https://aims2.llnl.gov/search). The land-cover map was obtained from the MCD12C1 (https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MCD12C1.006) and the Ecoregions 2017 (https://ecoregions.appspot.com). The terrain elevation is from GTOPO30 at https://doi.org/10.5066/F7DF6PQS. Global wind power density was derived from the Global Wind Atlas (https://globalwindatlas.info/en/download/gis-files). The global dataset of wind farm locations and power are available via Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11310269.v2 (ref. 85). All data generated in this study are available via the Peking University Open Research Data Platform at https://doi.org/10.18170/DVN/50VDAL (ref. 86).

Code availability

All codes used in this study are available via the Peking University Open Research Data Platform at https://doi.org/10.18170/DVN/50VDAL (ref. 86).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42275194) and National Key Research and Development Programme of China (2023YFC3707404).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Meng Qu, Lu Shen, Bolei Yang, Huiru Zhong & Xinrong Yang

  2. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China

    Zhenzhong Zeng

  3. State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Xi Lu

  4. Institute for Carbon Neutrality, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Xi Lu

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Contributions

L.S. designed the experiments and M.Q. carried them out. Z.Z. and B.Y. contributed to the data analysis. H.Z., X.Y. and X.L. contributed to the result interpretation. M.Q. and L.S. prepared the paper with contributions from all co-authors.

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Correspondence to Lu Shen.

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Qu, M., Shen, L., Zeng, Z. et al. Prolonged wind droughts in a warming climate threaten global wind power security. Nat. Clim. Chang. 15, 842–849 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02387-x

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