Assessing the Economic Value of Renewable Resource Complementarity for Power Systems: an ENTSO-E Study

Spatiotemporal complementarity between variable renewable energy sources (RES) has received a great deal of attention in recent years. However, its value for power systems is still not properly understood. This research gap is tackled in the current work by evaluating the benefits of siting RES assets according to resource complementarity criteria. To this end, a two-stage method is employed. First, the complementarity between RES is assessed and the locations sets that maximize it are selected using an integer programming model. Subsequently, the outcome of the first stage is used within an expansion planning framework which identifies the optimal system design and serves as a basis for assessing the economic value of RES complementarity for power systems. The analysis is conducted on a realistic case study targeting the deployment of 450 GW of offshore wind in Europe. Results show that siting based on RES complementarity is particularly attractive when the power density of wind developments is relatively high and when the inter-annual variability of the underlying resource is accounted for. More specifically, such a siting strategy leads to yearly savings between 0.3 and 1.2 billion EUR compared with conventional schemes seeking to deploy generation capacity at the most productive locations.