Capacity Expansion of High Renewable Penetrated Energy Systems Considering Concentrating Solar Power for Seasonal Energy Balance

TL;DR

This paper develops a long-term planning model for high renewable energy systems incorporating concentrating solar power (CSP) to address seasonal energy imbalance, demonstrating cost and curtailment reductions in Xinjiang by 2050.

Contribution

It introduces a novel expansion planning model integrating CSP for seasonal energy balance under high renewable penetration, with case study results for Xinjiang.

Findings

CSP deployment reduces system cost by 8.73%

Peak-valley net load difference decreases by 19.72%

Renewable curtailment drops by 58.24% at 65% renewable share

Abstract

With the increasing proportion of variable renewable energy which owns fluctuation characteristics and the promotion of the Clean Heating policy, the seasonal energy imbalance of the system has been more and more challenging. There is a lack of effective means to mitigate this challenge under the background of gradual compression of the traditional thermal unit construction. Concentrating solar power (CSP) is a promising technology to replace thermal units by integrating emergency boilers to cope with extreme weather, and can meet long-time energy balance as a seasonal peak regulation source. In this paper, we propose a long-term high-resolution expansion planning model of the energy system under high renewable penetration which integrates CSP technology for seasonal energy balance. With the projection to 2050, by taking the energy system in Xinjiang province which is a typical area of the Clean Heating project with rich irradiance as a case study, it shows that the optimal deployment of CSP and electric boiler (EB) can reduce the cost, peak-valley difference of net load and renewable curtailment by 8.73%, 19.72% and 58.24% respectively at 65% renewable penetration compared to the base scenario.