Abstract
Wind and hydropower together constitute nearly 80% of the renewable capacity in Australia and their resources are collocated. We show that wind and hydro generation capacity factors covary negatively at the interannual time scales. Thus, the technology diversity mitigates the variability of renewable power generation at the interannual scales. The asynchrony of wind and hydropower resources is explained by the differential impact of the two modes of the El Ni˜no Southern Oscillation – canonical and Modoki – on the wind and hydro resources. Also, the Modoki El Ni˜no and the Modoki La Ni˜na phases have greater impact. The seasonal impact patterns corroborate these results. As the proportion of wind power increases in Australia’s energy mix, this negative covariation has implications for storage capacity of excess wind generation at short time scales and for generation system adequacy at the longer time scales.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Journal | Scientific Reports |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 18 2017 |
Bibliographical note
KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01Acknowledgements: The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change by government, industry and foundation funding, the MIT Energy Initiative, and industrial sponsors. The research reported in this publication was supported by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). The MERRA data used in this study have been provided by the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) at NASA Goddard Flight Center. We are also grateful to the Griffth University, Australia, for supporting Willow Hallgren during the preparation of the manuscript.
