Research Opportunities in the Physical Design Optimization of Hybrid Power Plants: Preprint

With renewable energy growing to 10%-20% or more of overall electricity generation, design objectives for renewable power plants are shifting from producing energy at the lowest levelized cost to maximizing profitability. Several research and commercial efforts have investigated how to size respective generation and storage assets together for hybrid power plant systems - including wind, solar, battery storage and other technologies. However, the physical design of hybrid power plants has yet to be considered in detail. Even the design of individual solar and wind power plants is complex with large numbers of design variables, constraints and complex physical interactions across subsystems. Developing an integrated approach for the design of hybrid power plants including multiple generation technologies compounds this complexity and requires domain knowledge across the technologies as well as new approaches for addressing the statistical representation of resource availability and revenue opportunities. To inform the research needs on physical design of these hybrid power plants, a workshop was held in December 2018 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This paper provides a summary of findings from the workshop on research needs for hybrid power plant design.