This EPRI report provides a starting point for resource planners, corporate strategists and others engaged in long-term electric system planning to understand a range of considerations when contemplating future deployment of hybrid resources that contain both a renewable generation and energy storage components. In this report, we provide a brief survey of these considerations, provide electric company resource planners with a guide to more in-depth resources, and share key insights from recent resource planning exercises.
This report begins with a review of renewable hybrid resource deployments and evaluation in integrated resource plans. It then considers challenges in evaluating hybrid resources in resource planning, and explores approaches to addressing them, followed by a survey of motivations for development of hybrid resources. Also included are a brief survey of key enabling technologies; a discussion of some potential benefits and downsides of hybridizing; and key considerations for determining the configuration of a hybrid system. We have also prepared profiles of five recent deployments of announcements of renewable hybrid resources, with insights into the planning context and motivations for each, which are distributed throughout the report.