Assessment of on-site steady electricity generation from hybrid renewable energy systems in Chile

Chile has an immense renewable energy potential but its integration into the energy system constitutes a major challenge. The country has a complex topography that is expressed by a divided national grid with almost isolated subsystems and wide differences in the availability of renewable energy resources. The present study aims at evaluating the potentials of combining solar power, wind power and storage systems to provide steady loads already from the generation source. The analysis relies on an optimization model to size hybrid renewable energy systems and 10 years of weather data from the brand new ERA5 global reanalysis. Multiple scenarios are calculated and intercompared for all possible locations across the country. These scenarios include system sizing considering hourly weather data for the period 2008–2017 and for one year without major weather extreme events. In both analyses, the results are calculated for systems that generate 1 MWh of electricity at every time step and systems that have certain intraday flexibility. Results show that the necessary generation and storage capacities to provide a steady energy output are very high even for areas with exceptionally high renewable energy potential (in the Atacama desert the system configuration requirements could reach 10 MWp of photovoltaics and 10 MWh of storage). Intraday flexibility has direct effects on these results by reducing the total size of the systems but the effects on the sizes of the installations of the particular technologies depend on the individual geographical location.