This paper proposes a systematic framework to assess the complementarity of renewable resources over arbitrary geographical scopes and temporal scales which is particularly well-suited to exploit very large data sets of climatological data. The concept of critical time windows is introduced, and a spatio-temporal criticality indicator is proposed, consisting in a parametrised family of scalar indicators quantifying the complementarity between renewable resources in both space and time. The criticality indicator is leveraged to devise a family of optimisation problems identifying sets of locations with maximum complementarity under arbitrary geographical deployment constraints. The applicability of the framework is shown in a case study investigating the complementarity between the wind regimes in continental western Europe and southern Greenland, and its usefulness in a power system planning context is demonstrated. Besides showing that the occurrence of low wind power production events can be significantly 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 indicate potential benefits of intercontinental electrical interconnections.
In addition to assessing regional VRE resources in terms of electricity generation potential, the current work follows the approach proposed in REF , where inter-regional VRE resource complementarity in both space and time is investigated by means of a parametrised family of scalar indicators.
Critical Time Windows for Renewable Resource Complementarity Assessment
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