Too much of a good thing? Global trends in the curtailment of solar PV

Abstract

Highlights In 2018, more than 1% of potential PV output was curtailed in several key markets. Curtailment is driven by PV location, transmission limits, and oversupply. Curtailment follows seasonal patterns and is influenced by policy and grid planning. Grid flexibility, storage, demand response, and regional coordination reduce losses. Optimal rather than minimal curtailment is more efficient for future grid contexts.

Solar and wind grid system value in the United States: The effect of transmission congestion, generation profiles, and curtailment

“…Thus, the value of curtailed energy is low. Although curtailment of VRE has often been seen as a worrisome problem, O'Shaughnessy et al 57 provide a multi-country description of VRE curtailment and its impacts, and they suggest that the cost efficient VRE integration strategies will target an ''optimal'' amount of curtailment rather than target elimination of curtailment. Here, optimal could be defined by meeting multiple objectives, for example, minimizing costs and emissions across the electric system.…”

Assessing the role of vanadium technologies in decarbonizing hard-to-abate sectors and enabling the energy transition

“…At the current stage of the energy transition, the quantity of overgeneration across most of the world is much larger than the total capacity of installed grid-level energy storage ( Arbabzadeh et al., 2019 ; Canbulat et al., 2021 ; O’Shaughnessy et al., 2020 ); as such, a reasonable assumption is that currently, the full capacity of a VRFB will be utilized as per its specified use profile, i.e., number-of-cycles/day. To calculate the carbon savings made possible by a VRFB in a scenario where no other storage options are in place, we assume that the total renewable electricity that a battery could have stored must be later generated by a dispatchable source of electricity such as coal, according to Equation 1 : where denotes the carbon footprint of the total electricity production from a coal source (888 kg CO 2 eq/MWh delivered) ( Report, 2011 ), represents the carbon footprint of producing the same quantity of electricity from a renewable source (wind or solar, 16 kg CO 2 eq/MWh, and 106 kg CO 2 eq/MWh, respectively)( Report, 2011 ; Weber et al., 2018 ), and represents the total carbon footprint of the VRFB ( Weber et al., 2018 ).…”

Engineering Energy Markets: The Past, the Present, and the Future

“…For instance, Portland General Electric since 2018 experiments in the Portland Microgrid Testbed that covers an area of more than 20,000 customers. These concepts are pursued at a time when photovoltaic power generation is increasingly curtailed worldwide, which causes the need for local solutions (O'Shaughnessy et al 2020). New regulation on mandatory installations of solar panels on newly developed buildings, as discussed in Germany and implemented in California (Senet 2019), might further increase the need for smart energy solutions in densely populated areas.…”