# Critical Time Windows for Renewable Resource Complementarity Assessment

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a systematic framework for assessing renewable resource complementarity using critical time windows and a spatio-temporal indicator, aiding in optimal site selection and intercontinental power system planning.

## Contribution

It presents a novel framework with a criticality indicator and optimization methods for evaluating renewable resource complementarity across large datasets and geographical scales.

## Key findings

- Regional wind diversity reduces low production events
- Intercontinental site aggregation lowers system-wide risks
- Framework effectively guides renewable deployment strategies

## Abstract

This paper proposes a systematic framework to assess the complementarity of renewable resources over arbitrary geographical scopes and temporal scales which is particularly well-suited to exploit very large data sets of climatological data. The concept of critical time windows is introduced, and a spatio-temporal criticality indicator is proposed, consisting in a parametrised family of scalar indicators quantifying the complementarity between renewable resources in both space and time. The criticality indicator is leveraged to devise a family of optimisation problems identifying sets of locations with maximum complementarity under arbitrary geographical deployment constraints. The applicability of the framework is shown in a case study investigating the complementarity between the wind regimes in continental western Europe and southern Greenland, and its usefulness in a power system planning context is demonstrated. Besides showing that the occurrence of low wind power production events can be significantly reduced on a regional scale by exploiting diversity in local wind patterns, results highlight the fact that aggregating wind power production sites located on different continents may result in a lower occurrence of system-wide low wind power production events and indicate potential benefits of intercontinental electrical interconnections.