Discontinuity in the production rate due to the solar resource intermittency

Abstract

The economic risk of solar plant projects due to the inter-annual solar resource variability is usually quantified by the exceedance probabilities. The estimation of these probabilities depends on the datasets used for the study; actually, the uncertainty associated to these datasets affects the viability study of the project. Due to this dependence, in this work two different types of datasets are used in the estimation of the exceedance probabilities and their uncertainties: synthetic datasets and satellite-derived datasets. Besides, the intra-annual variability of the irradiation variations (intermittency) can affect the production rate of the solar plant. Thus, the knowledge of this variability allows us to foresee the discontinuities in the production rate of the solar plants and to plan the needs for high or low storage capacity according to different temporal periods. In order to quantify the effect of the intra-annual variability in the viability study, a Viability Index based on Discontinuity in the production rate, VID, is proposed, which estimates viability from the exceedance probabilities of the variations. The inclusion of this analysis can provide us with important information about the viability assessment of the projects.