Complementarity assessment of wind-solar energy sources in Shandong province based on NASA

The inherent complementarity of wind and solar energy resources is beneficial to smooth aggregate power and reduce ramp reserve capacity. This article proposes a progressive approach to assess the wind-solar complementarities in Shandong province, China for the preliminary planning of hybrid energy systems. Based on the NASA database, the long-term wind speed and solar irradiation data are obtained and transformed into capacity factors by virtual energy system models. Then, the local assessment that focuses on temporal characteristics is carried out to measure the complementarities in different time scales and search the optimal scale. Progressively, the space scale is extended from a local site to the whole study region and the global assessment is conducted to extract the spatial complementary characteristics. The assessment results are useful to provide the optimal temporal scale and spatial combination of wind-solar complementarity and the proposed approach can be generalised to other regions.