title: Solar electricity supply isolines of generation capacity and storage.
abstract: The recent sharp drop in the cost of photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation accompanied by globally rapidly increasing investment in PV plants calls for new planning and management tools for large-scale distributed solar networks. Of major importance are methods to overcome intermittency of solar electricity, i.e., to provide dispatchable electricity at minimal costs. We find that pairs of electricity generation capacity G and storage S that give dispatchable electricity and are minimal with respect to S for a given G exhibit a smooth relationship of mutual substitutability between G and S. These isolines between G and S support the solving of several tasks, including the optimal sizing of generation capacity and storage, optimal siting of solar parks, optimal connections of solar parks across time zones for minimizing intermittency, and management of storage in situations of far below average insolation to provide dispatchable electricity. G-S isolines allow determining the cost-optimal pair (G,S) as a function of the cost ratio of G and S. G-S isolines provide a method for evaluating the effect of geographic spread and time zone coverage on costs of solar electricity.
authors.affiliation: Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz, A-8010 Graz, Austria; International Center for Climate and Society, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822;
authors.forename: Wolf
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Grossmann
authors.affiliation: Climate and Energy Decision Making Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; and irisg@andrew.cmu.edu.
authors.forename: Iris
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Grossmann
authors.affiliation: Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz, A-8010 Graz, Austria; Department of Economics, University of Graz, A-8010 Graz, Austria.
authors.forename: Karl W
authors.initials: KW
authors.lastname: Steininger
keywords: US super grid; dispatchable solar electricity; large-scale solar network; photovoltaics; solar intermittency