<p class="MsoNormal">Several gigawatts of renewable technologies, such as wind and solar, need to be installed to reach a zero-carbon electricity system that meets current and future energy needs. Worldwide electricity generation from wind and solar amounted to just 5.4% and 2.7% in 2019, respectively. Under some energy transition scenarios, wind and solar energy will provide about 35% and 25% global electricity needs by 2050, respectively, becoming the prominent generation sources. Building a resilient and sustainable infrastructure that can withstand a high penetration of renewables, extreme weather, and a changing climate becomes therefore a critical issue. Locations of new installations are typically chosen based on wind and solar availability to maximize facilities’ capacity factors. Site selection of solar installations is mostly driven by solar irradiance and equivalent sun hours, whereas preferred locations for wind power plants have high mean wind speeds at the turbine hub height. Here, we show that this is not always true, and optimal siting depends also on the flexibility of the electricity system. To show this, we use a macro-scale energy model to evaluate capacities and dispatch in least cost electricity systems with distributed wind and solar generation supported by energy storage, with application to the U.S. The relatively simple and versatile macro-scale energy model that we use allows transparent evaluation of the different solutions. The least-cost solutions are determined by a linear optimizer that solves for the installed capacities and hourly dispatch for all technologies included in the system. The spatial distribution of wind and solar generations is evaluated thanks to the subdivision of the contiguous U.S. into the grid cells. These cells are defined in the reanalysis weather dataset from which we obtain hourly wind and solar resource data. In evaluating capacities and dispatch schedules, we consider a varying cost for energy storage. This evaluation is important if we consider that the energy storage could become much cheaper (relative to variable renewable energy generation) in the future as long duration energy storage becomes widely available. If energy storage were free and widely available, chosen locations for wind and solar installations would inevitably be in regions with the highest resource availability. However, as the energy storage cost increases and thus storage capacity decreases, chosen locations have lower capacity factors and the electricity system is more reliant on wind generation. In the case of a system without energy storage, only wind generation would in fact meet certain periods of electricity demand. This study also suggests that current optimal wind and solar siting may no longer be the best solution as the storage cost decreases.</p>

Meeting Electricity Demand With Distributed Wind and Solar Generation: System Flexibility Drives Optimal Siting

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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