TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC PROSPECTS OF RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCES

Abstract

Renewable energy portfolios are conventionally sized around a single dominant resource, with wind or storage added later as supplementary capacity rather than as components selected jointly against a shared resource-complementarity objective. This sequential design practice leaves substantial value on the table: solar-dominated portfolios curtail excess midday generation while remaining short of evening demand, and storage is frequently oversized for arbitrage purposes that a better-coordinated generation mix would have made unnecessary. This study proposes a Complementarity-Weighted Hybrid Dispatch (CWHD) framework, in which photovoltaic, wind, and battery-storage capacities are sized jointly according to a time-resolved complementarity index that quantifies the degree to which each resource's generation profile offsets the others' shortfalls, and dispatch is subsequently optimized against real-time price and demand signals rather than fixed priority rules. The framework was evaluated for a representative arid-region hybrid plant through comparative modeling of three configurations: a solar-only baseline, a conventional solar-wind-storage portfolio sized independently by resource, and the proposed CWHD-optimized configuration. The proposed configuration reduced curtailment from 11.3% to 3.7%, lowered the levelized cost of electricity to 34.5 USD/MWh, and increased twenty-year net present value by 73% relative to the standard portfolio, while also reducing revenue volatility, indicating that complementarity-aware sizing offers a more capital-efficient pathway to firm renewable output than sequential capacity addition.