Critical time windows for renewable resource complementarity assessment

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework to assess the complementarity between geographically dispersed variable renewable energy resources over arbitrary time scales. More precisely, the framework relies on the concept of critical time windows, which offers an accurate time-domain description of low probability power production events impacting power system operation and planning. A scalar criticality indicator is derived to quantify the spatiotemporal complementarity that renewable generation sites may exhibit, and it is leveraged to propose optimisation models seeking to identify deployment patterns with maximum complementarity. The usefulness of the framework is shown in a case study investigating the complementarity between wind regimes in continental western Europe and southern Greenland, using roughly 300 candidate locations and 10 years of reanalysis and simulated data with hourly resolution. Besides showing that the occurrence of low wind power production events can be reduced on a regional scale by exploiting diversity in local wind patterns, results highlight the fact that aggregating wind power production sites located on different continents may result in a lower occurrence of system-wide low wind power production events and point to potential benefits of intercontinental electricity interconnections.