Long-distance interconnection as solar resource intermittency solution: Optimizing the use of energy storage and the geographic dispersion + interconnection of solar generating facilities

As governments worldwide look to increase the capacity of PV and other variable generation sources in their generation portfolios, dealing with resource intermittency begins to take center stage in the debate over how to achieve ambitious renewable energy targets. Variability o f the solar resource occurs across many different temporal scales: from cloud-driven variability on the order of seconds to seasonal variability driven by the Earth´s sidereal orbit and axial tilt. We develop herein a model to investigate the impacts and technological solutions to variability at the temporal scale of greater than one day - variability linked to the passage of seasons and regional-scale meteorological phenomena. We investigate two supply-side technology and planning-driven techniques to mitigate the impacts of stochastic and deterministic resource intermittency: Bulk electrical energy storage and Long-distance interconnection coupled with geographic dispersion of solar generating facilities. A quantitative analytical framework has been developed in the context of this research by which to weigh the environmental and economic tradeoffs between these two approaches for a given geographic region. We use 24 years of globally distributed, daily-averaged, satellite-derived irradiances derived from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) via NASA´s Surface Meteorology and Solar Energy (SSE) database to model time/site-specific photovoltaic production across the globe at the time scales of one day or more. Within this paper, we discuss the model´s operation, apply it to a region spanning the European/MENA region, centered in Madrid and provide a discussion of the results, including an economic optimization of the interconnection/storage solution needed to alleviate intermittency and serve predetermined load requirements.