The spatial and temporal variability of renewables have important economic implications for investments and system operations. This study describes a method for selecting representative hours to preserve key distributional requirements for regional load, wind, and solar time series with a two-orders-of-magnitude reduction in dimensionality. We describe the implementation of this procedure in the US-REGEN model and compare impacts on energy system decisions with more common approaches. The results demonstrate how power sector modeling and capacity planning decisions are sensitive to representation of intra-annual variation and how our proposed approach significantly outperforms simple heuristic selection procedures with lower resolution. The representative hour approach preserves key properties of the joint underlying hourly distributions, whereas seasonal average approaches over-value wind and solar at higher penetration levels and under-value investment in firm capacity by inaccurately capturing the corresponding residual load duration curves.