Analysis of the techno-economic viability of a solar wind hybrid power plant

Abstract

The transition towards an electricity system based on renewable energies leads the battle to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions already reflected in the 2015 Paris Agreement, and it is a key line of action to comply with the international commitment to deal with the social, economic and environmental challenges of globalization, the 2030 horizon. Given the fossil fuels depletion and their polluting effect, renewable energy sources are today a clean, sustainable and inexhaustible generation alternative, where wind and photovoltaic energy, two of the most competitive renewable technologies, play a fundamental role. In Spain, single-resource renewable generation plants, such as a solar field or a wind farm, are fundamental to the modern renewable energy economy, especially in the context of one of the countries in Europe with the most people living in condominium, a housing typology that creates more barriers for the implementation of distributed generation systems in the cities. An important problem as the penetration of wind and photovoltaic energy increases lies in their intermittency, since this energy is conditioned by wind and solar resources, subject to variation in climate and time, which makes it difficult to integrate the electrical production of these sources in the electricity management and distribution system. A tool that is presented as effective to deal with this problem resides in solar wind hybrid power plants, based on the space-time complementarity of wind and solar resources. These facilities seek a less intermittent and more optimized power generation, thus supporting the reliability, profitability and stability of the network system. The design of individual solar and wind power plants involves a large number of design variables, constraints and complex physical factors, so this new paradigm creates an opportunity for the development of new integrated design approaches in which the knowledge of the resources and technologies, as well as the regulatory framework, will be essential.