(357h) Dynamics of Solar and Wind Power Variability and Implications for Chemical and Material Industries

Increasing deployment of solar and wind power technologies combined with further electrification of energy services could significantly reduce reliance on fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. If energy systems become heavily reliant on solar and wind energy, fluctuations in these resources could present new challenges for reliably providing a responsive energy supply, while also introducing new opportunities to lower system costs for industries that can modulate their demand to match power availability. As such, there is considerable interest in designing and developing chemical and material processes that can utilize electricity flexibly.

In this work, we characterize the size and dynamics of fluctuations in solar and wind resources to elucidate how industrial processes might ease the adoption of renewable resources and increase utilization of electricity infrastructure. Using forty years of weather reanalysis data for the coterminous United States, models of renewable energy technologies, empirical time series of electricity demand, and an energy system model, we simulate the hourly operation of possible future energy systems that rely heavily upon solar and wind power and energy storage to meet demand reliably over decades. We quantify the size of renewable power fluctuations and examine their dynamics over time and in space. We identify common characteristics of meteorological patterns that could lead to resource droughts as well as times when potentially excess energy might be generated. We then quantify how these characteristics might change under different scenarios, which include deploying additional energy storage, expanding transmission infrastructure, and relying on alternative power generators; and we examine how system costs might respond. The results provide insights into how to design new flexible chemical and material processes and schedule their operation in order to enable greater utilization of renewable energy resources and lower electricity costs.