One site, one interconnection, multiple megawatts of clean energy from solar and wind systems, smoothed out and rendered grid-friendly with the addition of a co-located energy storage system. Such is the promise of hybrid renewable energy systems, which, as outlined on the previous pages, are seemingly poised to become an exciting new frontier in the decarbonisation of the global energy system.
The current interest in hybrids is perhaps unsurprising. Wind and solar have traditionally been thought of as having limitations related to their inherent intermittence. But side by side, those negatives are largely cancelled out, and coupled with storage offer the promise of reliable, dispatchable power traditionally thought of as the preserve of fossil fuel generation.
“Wind is typically strongest at night, solar production during the day, so if you put the two of them together you have a higher capacity factor,” says Navigant senior analyst Alex Eller. “And if you add in storage, theoretically you could have round-the- clock output.”
More surprising, perhaps, than the apparent interest in hybrids is the question of why it’s taken this long for them to come to mainstream attention. Individually solar and wind have an enviable track record of rising deployment and falling costs, and the notion of putting them together to overcome their respective weaknesses is not a particularly new one.
Storage is certainly a newer kid on the block, but as we hear elsewhere in this edition of PV Tech Power, in certain markets such as the US and Canada, the large-scale solar-plus-storage nut appears well on the way to being truly cracked (‘See also ‘A developer’s eye view on North America’).
The reality, of course, is that what looks on paper like a seductively simple idea masks a number of interconnected complexities relating to cost, technology and market drivers that together make the hybridisation of the three technologies (and possibly others too) far from a simple prospect.
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