OUTPUT VARIABILITY IN EUROPE’S LARGEST PV POWER PLANT

摘要

As the cost of photovoltaic systems is driven lower and the “grid parity” milestone of energy costappears closer, the grid-integration challenges posed by the variable output of those systems have received increasingattention. At the same time due to economies of scale and an operations mode that is familiar to electric utilities,large, “central-generation” PV systems are being constructed at an ever increasing pace. While the output variabilityof distributed PV systems is mitigated from geographical dispersion and low correlation over typical distances, theoutput of central-generation systems is much more sensitive to local weather variability. Still, the sheer size of a verylarge system already provides a smoothing effect to the total output as such a system can be described as anaggregation of smaller arrays connected to a single inverter each. In this work we demonstrate and characterize thesmoothing effect of the spatial expanse for the continent’s largest contiguous PV system in Rovigo, Italy. We willexplore the variability of power output across multiple time, spatial, and capacity domains.