Seasonal optimal mix of wind and solar power in a future, highly renewable Europe

Dominik Heide, Lueder von Bremen, Martin Greiner, Clemens Hoffmann, Markus Speckmann and Stefan Bofinger

Renewable Energy, 2010, vol. 35, issue 11, 2483-2489

Abstract: The renewable power generation aggregated across Europe exhibits strong seasonal behaviors. Wind power generation is much stronger in winter than in summer. The opposite is true for solar power generation. In a future Europe with a very high share of renewable power generation those two opposite behaviors are able to counterbalance each other to a certain extent to follow the seasonal load curve. The best point of counterbalancing represents the seasonal optimal mix between wind and solar power generation. It leads to a pronounced minimum in required stored energy. For a 100% renewable Europe the seasonal optimal mix becomes 55% wind and 45% solar power generation. For less than 100% renewable scenarios the fraction of wind power generation increases and that of solar power generation decreases.

Keywords: Wind power generation; Solar power generation; Large-scale integration; Power-supply system design; Storage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (160)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148110001291
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:35:y:2010:i:11:p:2483-2489

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2010.03.012

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().