Issue |
E3S Web Conf.
Volume 181, 2020
2020 5th International Conference on Sustainable and Renewable Energy Engineering (ICSREE 2020)
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Article Number | 02004 | |
Number of page(s) | 5 | |
Section | Solar Energy Development and Utilization | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/e3sconf/202018102004 | |
Published online | 24 July 2020 |
Capacity factors of solar photovoltaic energy facilities in California, annual mean and variability
1 Mechanical Engineering Department, College of Engineering, Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University, Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia
2 School of Engineering, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia
* Corresponding author: a.a.boretti@gmail.com
The capacity factors of the largest solar photovoltaic (PV) energy facilities of California are computed, based on a low-frequency monthly statistic that is covering the last few years. While the best-performing facilities achieve annual capacity factors of about 32-33%, the average annual capacity factor is less than 30%, at about 26-27%. The scattered information on costs suggests a cost penalty of 35% for a capacity factor gain of 10%. Higher frequency data of 1-minute or less for every facility connected to the same grid and the grid average energy supply are needed to define the energy storage indispensable to cover a given demand. The individual facility energy production requires to account for a cost associated with an energy storage allowance to every producer of intermittent and unpredictable electricity, with this amount inversely proportional to the annual average capacity factor and directly proportional to the standard deviation of the high-frequency capacity factors.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2020
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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