**Status:**Published
**Citation:**Blanford, GJ; Merrick, JH; Bistline, JET; Young, DT. 2018. “Simulating Annual Variation in Load, Wind, and Solar by Representative Hour Selection.” Published in The Energy Journal 39(3):189–212.
A key question for energy system planners and modelers is what role wind and solar could play in the transition to a low-carbon energy system. To explore this question effectively, a model must capture the strong effect of temporal and spatial variability on the fundamental economics of variable renewable energy. A new peer-reviewed article “Simulating Annual Variation in Load, Wind, and Solar by Representative Hour Selection” was recently published in The Energy Journal to provide methods for efficiently representing these dynamics in capacity planning models.
Written by Geoff Blanford, James Merrick, John Bistline, and David Young, the article describes the novel approach used in EPRI’s US-REGEN model for selecting representative hours to key distributional requirements for load, wind, and solar time series across inter-connected model regions, including extreme hours that represent potential capacity shortfalls and surpluses in renewable output. The results demonstrate how power sector modeling and capacity planning decisions are sensitive to the representation of intra-annual variation and how our proposed approach outperforms simpler selection procedures with lower resolution, which are common in existing modeling frameworks.
Link to Journal article: The Energy Journal