From pv magazine Spain
Scientists at the University of Murcia have developed Climax, an open-source tool that uses the synergy between wind and PV to reduce the variability of their combined production. Climax identifies regions with consistent temporal resource variability and determines the optimal allocation of each technology in those regions.
The researchers have developed an approach that goes beyond considering each resource individually and focuses on their combined utilization. By strategically locating facilities where solar and wind resources can complement each other, they aim to achieve greater efficiency. According to the researchers, implementing this strategy optimally could reduce monthly anomalies in total electricity production from solar and wind sources by up to 60%.
To determine suitable locations, the researchers have combined data and patterns of solar radiation and wind speed over time in specific regions. This allows them to identify areas where favorable conditions exist for higher yields between the two energy sources.
“The target spatial domain and temporal scale (at which the temporal variability of the production is to be reduced) are eligible fields, the total shares of each technology can be fixed, forced to stay above/below certain thresholds or let free to find their optimum, and the minimum production to be guaranteed can be modified,” said the scientists. “Also, an additional code is made available on the webpage to find optimum locations for new installations given that the current spatial distribution of installations is known, which might be the most useful application of the tool for the short-term decision making.”
They presented the new tool in the paper “An Action-Oriented Approach to Make the Most of the Wind and Solar Power Complementarity,” published in Earth's Future.
“The method, implemented in an open-access user-friendly and customizable tool called Climax (http://climax.inf.um.es/), has been proven here in an illustrative pilot study over pan-European regions for which the temporal variability of the monthly wind-plus-solar production is to be reduced,” the scientists said.
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