PNNL

Abstract

Renewable energy technology adoption is on the rise in the United States, with high levels of new resources expected to be needed to meet national clean energy goals. While distributed wind energy has over 1,400 GW of potentially profitable deployment, less than 0.01% of that has currently been deployed. One barrier to distributed wind energy adoption is the variability of the wind resource, which can cause uncertainty and instability in the grid if not accounted for. Pairing distributed wind with other technologies, such as solar photovoltaics and/or energy storage, can alleviate some of the issues related to variability due to potential complementarity of resources and dispatchability. In this study we describe the potential impacts of adding solar photovoltaics and/or energy storage to a distributed wind energy installation, providing a qualitative ranking system for each value stream that might be available for the new hybrid power system, and quantitative results for the potential dollars per year that might be possible for select value streams. We find that hybridizing can add value to all value streams, though adding energy storage makes these impacts much larger than simply adding solar photovoltaics.