Weather-dependent renewable energy resources are playing a key role in decarbonizing electricity. There is a growing body of analysis on the impacts of wind and solar variability on power system operation. Existing studies tend to use a single or typical year of generation data, which overlooks the substantial year-to-year fluctuation in weather, or to only consider variation in the meteorological inputs, which overlooks the complex response of an interconnected power system. Here, we address these gaps by combining detailed continent-wide modeling of Europe's future power system with 30 years of historical weather data. The most representative single years are 1989 and 2012, but using multiple years reveals a 5-fold increase in Europe's inter-annual variability of CO₂ emissions and total generation costs from 2015 to 2030. We also find that several metrics generalize to linear functions of variable renewable penetration: CO₂ emissions, curtailment of renewables, wholesale prices, and total system costs.

依赖天气的可再生能源在电力脱碳方面发挥着关键作用。关于风能和太阳能变化对电力系统运行影响的分析越来越多。现有的研究倾向于使用单一或典型年份的发电数据，忽略了天气逐年的大幅波动，或者仅考虑气象输入的变化，忽略了互连电力系统的复杂响应。在这里，我们通过将欧洲未来电力系统的详细全大陆模型与 30 年的历史天气数据相结合来解决这些差距。_{最具代表性的单年是 1989 年和 2012 年，但使用多个年份显示，从 2015 年到 2030 年，欧洲 CO 2}排放量和总发电成本的年际变化增加了 5 倍。我们还发现，几个指标可推广为以下线性函数：可变的可再生能源渗透率：CO ₂排放、可再生能源削减、批发价格和系统总成本。