Capacity configuration of hydropower-PV complementary station that is robust to the inter-annual variability in streamflow and PV energy

Yifei Zheng, Juntao Zhang, Chuntian Cheng, Hui Cao and Yuqi Yang

Renewable Energy, 2025, vol. 248, issue C

Abstract: Conventional methods for sizing variable renewable energy (VRE) capacity integrated into hydropower are fed with several typical weather days or a single weather year dataset, which reduce computational complexity while neglecting the inter-annual variability of VRE and streamflow and yielding potentially unreliable results. This study proposes a novel tractable long-term model at hourly resolution to investigate the potential of hydro–VRE complementary operation for load following, reliable electricity supplying and to size the VRE capacity integrated into the hydropower stations. This methodology was applied to an actual hydropower-photovoltaic (PV) complementary station in China. We found that (1) PV capacity integrated into the hydropower is highly sensitive to the inter-annual variability of streamflow and PV energy; the PV capacity sized based on single-year-simulation ranges from 446 MW to 725 MW. (2) The PV deployment capacity based on 12-year-simulation is 510 MW. Compared with the PV deployment capacities based on single-year-simulation, it enables better hydropower-PV complementary load following performances and an average increase of 2.06 × 105 MWh in the annual electricity supply.

Keywords: Hydropower; Variable renewable energy; Multi-year simulation; Capacity configuration; Inter-annual variability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148125008250
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:248:y:2025:i:c:s0960148125008250

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2025.123163

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 ().