Compressible Turbulence in the Solar Wind near the Sun
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SERENA: Particle Instrument Suite for Determining the Sun-Mercury Interaction from BepiColombo
The ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission to Mercury will provide simultaneous measurements from two spacecraft, offering an unprecedented opportunity to investigate magnetospheric and exospheric particle dynamics at Mercury as well as their interactions with solar wind, solar radiation, and interplanetary dust. The particle instrument suite SERENA (Search for Exospheric Refilling and Emitted Natural Abundances) is flying in space on-board the BepiColombo Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and is the only instrument for ion and neutral particle detection aboard the MPO. It comprises four independent sensors: ELENA for neutral particle flow detection, Strofio for neutral gas detection, PICAM for planetary ions observations, and MIPA, mostly for solar wind ion measurements. SERENA is managed by a System Control Unit located inside the ELENA box. In the present paper the scientific goals of this suite are described, and then the four units are detailed, as well as their major features and calibration results. Finally, the SERENA operational activities are shown during the orbital path around Mercury, with also some reference to the activities planned during the long cruise phase.
79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
Impacts of Climate Change on the Generation Potential of Solar and Wind Energy Systems in India
Low-carbon energy sources like wind and solar are essential for decarbonizing the electricity sector. In addition, the cost of electricity generated from these sources has plummeted over the last decade. Therefore, these energy sources are poised to take a significant share of the total installed capacity soon. However, they are susceptible to the impacts of climate change as their generation potential depends on the weather conditions. Estimating the installed capacity requirements of solar and wind energy to decarbonize the power sector without accounting for these possible changes in generation potential could lead to missing out on the set climate goals and meeting future electricity demand. This study evaluates the effect of climate change on the generation potential of wind and solar energy systems in India for two future periods, 2050 and 2070, under two climate scenarios or Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP): SSP245 and SSP585. Almost all regions show a decrease, and most regions show a significant decline (>5%) in the generation potential of solar Photovoltaic (PV) as compared to 2010 levels under both climate scenarios and future periods. The changes in the generation potential of wind energy are more significant (>10%), and the majority of regions show a decline in generation potential. Southwestern and central regions show an increase in wind generation potential for 2070 as compared to 2050 levels under the SSP245 scenario and the SSP585 scenario, respectively.
climate change↗
A hybrid data-driven and model-based approach for computationally efficient stochastic unit commitment and economic dispatch under wind and solar uncertainty
Stochastic unit commitment (UC) and economic dispatch (ED) are imperative in dealing with uncertainty in renewable forecast for power system operation and planning such that the overall expected production cost is minimized over the planning horizon. However, accurate calculation of the expected production cost requires assessment of a very large number of different scenarios of uncertain renewable resources, such as solar and wind, which is practically infeasible to simulate in real time. This article proposes a hybrid datadriven and physics-based model-predictive paradigm to efficiently solve for stochastic unit commitment and economic dispatch considering uncertainty in wind and solar power forecasts. Here, the novelty of the approach lies in decoupling the production cost estimation from the unit commitment and economic dispatch optimization problems under uncertainty without compromising on the fidelity of the solutions. A data-driven machine learning model is first developed to predict the mean optimal production cost. A physics-based inverse problem is then solved to get the stochastic UC and ED profiles from the expected cost. The presented approach considers, for the first time, solar uncertainty in UC/ED determination and enables efficient and accurate propagation of wind and solar uncertainty to estimate the statistics of the production cost. The effectiveness of the developed approach is demonstrated systematically on a stylized RTS-GMLC single-node system. The overall framework predicts the expected cost 62.5% more accurately than the existing state-of-the-art, on unforeseen days during the entire year, and yields, for the first time, the associated physically consistent UC and ED profiles. The solutions are also shown to be flexible in providing adequate daily reserves to address any statistical deviations from probabilistic power forecasts. The computational time associated with the presented method is only about 10 s compared to over 24 h needed for a conventional stochastic UC/ED determination under uncertainty on an Intel Core i9 processor with 32 GB of RAM.
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
Wind and Solar Hybrid Power Plants for Energy Resilience
Wind-solar-storage hybrid power plants represent a significant and growing share of new proposed projects in the United States (U.S.). Their uptake is supported by increasing renewable energy market share, technical abilities for dispatch and control, and decreasing wind, solar, and battery storage costs. Simultaneously, generation and storage resources are increasingly used in distributed power systems. While concerns around the reliability of the aging, transforming U.S. electric grid are growing, diversifying energy resources through hybridization or spatial distribution provides an opportunity to enhance power system resilience compared to single-source generation. Understanding where to build hybrids for resilience value, rather than bulk power supply, has not been fully explored in previous studies. Therefore, in this study, we complete a national complementarity analysis to identify areas in the U.S. that are particularly suited for wind-solar hybrid power plant development. We show the importance of seasonal and diurnal patterns in assessing complementarity, and identify that regions in the Great Plains, Midwest, and Southeast are particularly suited for hybrid power plants. We demonstrate the resilience value of hybridization for a reference system based near Memphis, Tennessee, and show optimal sizing of wind, solar, and storage assets given 1.0 and 0.9 critical load factors. Results indicate that pairing wind and solar assets better meet constant load demand and reduce storage requirements compared to solar alone. These results enable future work integrating complementarity metrics in resilience frameworks and indicate a need for more finer resolution of local resource, demand, and hazard data.
14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
The value of seasonal energy storage technologies for the integration of wind and solar power
Energy storage at all timescales, including the seasonal scale, plays a pivotal role in enabling increased penetration levels of wind and solar photovoltaic energy sources in power systems.
Guerra, Omar J.↗
Potential impacts of climate change on wind and solar electricity generation in Texas
Wind and solar energy sources are climate and weather dependent, therefore susceptible to a changing climate. in this paper, we quantify the impacts of climate change on wind and solar electricity generation under high concentrations of greenhouse gases in Texas. We employ mid-twenty-first century climate projections and a high-resolution numerical weather prediction model to generate weather variables in the future and produce wind and solar generation time series. We find that mid-twenty-first century projections based on five global climate models agree on the multiyear average increases across Texas in direct normal irradiance, global horizontal irradiance, surface air temperature, and 100-m wind speed of up to 5%, 4%, 10%, and 1%, respectively. These changes lead to multiyear average relative changes across Texas of -0.6 to + 2.5% and of + 1.3 to + 3.5% in solar and wind capacity factors, respectively, with significant regional, seasonal, and diurnal differences. Areas with low solar resource show an increase in solar capacity factors but reductions in wind capacity factors. Areas with high solar resource show reductions in solar capacity factors. The spatial and temporal differences in our results highlight the importance of using high-resolution data sets to study the potential impacts of climate change on wind and solar power.
14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
Joint Resource Modeling and Assessment for Hybrid Distributed Solar and Wind Systems
The inherent variability and uncertainty in distributed energy resources can presents myriad challenges to the planning and operations of power systems. These risks are poised to become larger as the penetration of renewable energy sources rises in the power generation mix. Hybrid solar-wind energy systems are able to mitigate some of these risks by their complementary resource availability. Surface solar and wind fields are coupled and correlated in both space and time. Appropriately estimating the hybrid solar wind energy system requires simulating the spatio-temporal structure of these fields that can be produced for each time horizon. We introduce a novel joint spatio-temporal stochastic differential equation (SPDE) approach that captures the spatio-temporal dynamics of solar and wind fields and their joint dependency over a domain for each time step. In the case study on Colorado, we consider nonstationary three-level hierarchical spatio temporal models for both hourly solar irradiance data and wind speed data in Colorado. Dependence between the solar irradiance data and wind speed data is captured by a shared spatio-temporal random effect. Our approach performs well in terms of the prediction score criterion.
joint modeling↗
Solar and Wind Forecast Error Reserve Sharing in a Multi-Utility Region
As electricity systems transition to higher levels of solar and wind generation, electric system operators will likely need to hold additional reserves to manage the forecast error associated with these resources. Because wind and solar forecast errors tend to be poorly correlated across space, system operators can reduce their reserve requirements by sharing reserves. This paper examines the value of forecast error reserve sharing among balancing areas in the Southeast United States. It finds that forecast error reserve requirements increase linearly with growth in solar and wind generation capacity but that reserve sharing can significantly reduce physical (MW) reserve requirements (from 25%-26% to 18%-19% of average load in high solar scenarios). It finds that the value of forecast error reserve sharing declines with higher levels of solar and wind generation, due to lower wholesale energy and reserve prices. Even with declines in wholesale prices, forecast error reserve sharing can still provide substantial value (as much as $\$$400 million per year in a high solar scenario), though with higher levels of solar, wind, and electricity storage, this value is increasingly tied to avoiding scarcity prices. The results suggest the importance of coordinated capacity expansion planning for forecast error reserve sharing.
14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
A simplified, efficient approach to hybrid wind and solar plant site optimization
Abstract. Wind plant layout optimization is a difficult, complex problem with a large number of variables and many local minima. Layout optimization only becomes more difficult with the addition of solar generation. In this paper, we propose a parameterized approach to wind and solar hybrid power plant layout optimization that greatly reduces problem dimensionality while guaranteeing that the generated layouts have a desirable regular structure. Thus far, hybrid power plant optimization research has focused on system sizing. We go beyond sizing and present a practical approach to optimizing the physical layout of a wind–solar hybrid power plant. We argue that the evolution strategy class of derivative-free optimization methods is well-suited to the parameterized hybrid layout problem, and we demonstrate how hard layout constraints (e.g., placement restrictions) can be transformed into soft constraints that are amenable to optimization using evolution strategies. Next, we present experimental results on four test sites, demonstrating the viability, reliability, and effectiveness of the parameterized evolution strategy approach for generating optimized hybrid plant layouts. Completing the tool kit for parameterized layout generation, we include a brief tutorial describing how the parameterized evolutionary approach can be inspected, understood, and debugged when applied to hybrid plant layouts.
14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
Understanding How Siting Ordinances Impact Wind and Solar Resource Availability
This poster summarizes the wind and solar ordinances collected by NREL in 2018 and in 2022. It demonstrates the impact of those ordinances on land availability through the contiguous United States.
ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY,SOLAR ENERGY,↗
Strategies for Continuous Balancing in Future Power Systems with High Wind and Solar Shares
The use of wind power has grown strongly in recent years and is expected to continue to increase in the coming decades. Solar power is also expected to increase significantly. In a power system, a continuous balance is maintained between total production and demand. This balancing is currently mainly managed with conventional power plants, but with larger amounts of wind and solar power, other sources will also be needed. Interesting possibilities include continuous control of wind and solar power, battery storage, electric vehicles, hydrogen production, and other demand resources with flexibility potential. The aim of this article is to describe and compare the different challenges and future possibilities in six systems concerning how to keep a continuous balance in the future with significantly larger amounts of variable renewable power production. A realistic understanding of how these systems plan to handle continuous balancing is central to effectively develop a carbon-dioxide-free electricity system of the future. The systems included in the overview are the Nordic synchronous area, the island of Ireland, the Iberian Peninsula, Texas (ERCOT), the central European system, and Great Britain.
14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
Grid Value and Cost of Utility-Scale Wind and Solar: Potential Implications for Consumer Electricity Bills [Slides]
Wind and solar cost declines and wholesale power price fluctuations have once again brought the “hedge value” of renewable energy to front of mind. Meanwhile, recent research has found that cost savings are the most persuasive driver of broad support for renewable energy. Yet whether consumers directly benefit from the price hedge that wind and solar can provide depends on various factors, most notably the contractual and market structures under which these generators operate. Drawing upon a vast amount of plant-level empirical data, we quantify the net market value (“net value”) of wind and solar over time and explore various factors that determine the extent to which consumers can capture and benefit from that value. The focus is on elements that may directly impact consumer electricity bills.
14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
Impact of Siting Ordinances on Land Availability for Wind and Solar Development
In the United States, many siting regulations for wind and solar developments are created at the county or township level. Here we survey local zoning ordinances across the contiguous United States to understand the types and frequency of ordinances that might impact wind and solar development. We identify over 1,800 ordinances for wind and more than 800 ordinances for solar in 2022. To understand the impact of ordinances on anticipated land availability, we use spatial modelling on the setbacks specified in the ordinances. Extrapolating the setbacks throughout the country can reduce wind and solar resources by up to 87% and 38%, respectively, depending on the size of the setbacks applied. These results indicate the importance of capturing setback ordinances in resources assessments so as to not overstate resource potential, especially when considering highly decarbonized futures.
county↗
Solar and Wind Forecast Error Reserve Sharing in a Multi-Utility Region
As electricity systems transition to higher levels of solar and wind generation, electric system operators will likely need to hold additional reserves to manage solar and wind forecast error. Because solar and wind forecast errors tend to be weakly correlated across space, system operators can reduce their reserve requirements by sharing reserves. This paper examines the benefits of forecast error reserve sharing among balancing areas in the Southeastern United States, in scenarios in which solar and wind generation ranges from 34% to 65% of total generation. It finds that day-ahead forecast error reserve requirements increase linearly with growth in solar and wind generation capacity (6%-10% of total capacity), but that reserve sharing can significantly reduce these requirements (by 6%-29%). It finds that, in economic terms, the value of forecast error reserve sharing ($\$$0.09-$\$$1.24 billion per year, $\$$0.12-$\$$1.68/MWh of load across scenarios) tends to decline with higher levels of solar and wind generation, due to lower reserve and energy prices. Even with declines in reserve prices, forecast error reserve sharing can still provide substantial value, though with higher levels of solar, wind, and electricity storage this value is increasingly tied to avoiding scarcity prices.
14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
Impact of Siting Ordinances on Land Availability for Wind and Solar Development
This presentation summarizes the impact of siting on wind and solar resource availability. It was presented at RE+ 2023.
ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY,SOLAR ENERGY,↗
Impact of Siting Ordinances on Land Availability for Wind and Solar Development
In the United States, many siting regulations for wind and solar developments are created at the county or township level. Here we survey local zoning ordinances across the contiguous United States to understand the types and frequency of ordinances that might impact wind and solar development. We identify over 1,800 ordinances for wind and more than 800 ordinances for solar in 2022. To understand the impact of ordinances on anticipated land availability, we use spatial modelling on the setbacks specified in the ordinances. Extrapolating the setbacks throughout the country can reduce wind and solar resources by up to 87% and 38%, respectively, depending on the size of the setbacks applied. These results indicate the importance of capturing setback ordinances in resources assessments so as to not overstate resource potential.
24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
Achieving an 80% carbon-free electricity system in China by 2035
Dramatic reductions in solar, wind, and battery storage costs create new opportunities to reduce emissions and costs in China’s electricity sector, beyond current policy goals. This study examines the cost, reliability, emissions, public health, and employment implications of increasing the share of non-fossil fuel (“carbon free”) electricity generation in China to 80% by 2035. The analysis uses state-of-the-art modeling with high resolution load, wind, and solar inputs. The study finds that achieving an 80% carbon free electricity system in China by 2035 could reduce wholesale electricity costs, relative to a current policy baseline, while maintaining high levels of reliability, reducing deaths from air pollution, and increasing employment. In our 80% scenario, wind and solar generation capacity reach 3 TW and battery storage capacity reaches 0.4 TW by 2035, implying a rapid scale up in these resources that will require changes in policy targets, markets and regulation, and land use policies.
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗