As long as people have used wind and solar to generate electricity, critics have repeated the same: The wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine. While this is undeniably true, MIT researchers argue that better planning can transform renewables’ variability into an asset.
The problem with variable renewable energy Wind and solar convert the abundant energy of the wind and sun into clean, sustainable electricity. However, even countries with the most wind turbines and solar panels cannot rely on these energy sources alone to meet all electricity demands.
Variable energy sources present a challenge: intermittency. When the wind doesn’t blow, wind power disappears. When the sun doesn’t shine, solar power vanishes. The grid demands stability to meet real-time electricity needs, and renewables can’t provide that without significant investment in storage systems like batteries.
MIT’s low-cost alternative. A new MIT study offers a different perspective: Careful planning of wind and solar installations can turn renewables’ variability into an advantage. This approach lowers the need for expensive battery storage and significantly reduces overall system costs.
The study highlights how fine-scale planning (at a resolution of miles rather than tens of miles) enhances the complementarity of energy sources. For example, when solar output dips in one area, nearby wind resources can fill the gap, ensuring a more balanced electricity supply.
It’s a matter of scale. The researchers focused on three U.S. regions with high renewable energy adoption: California, Texas, and New England. They replaced traditional large-scale maps with higher-resolution weather data, analyzing areas as small as 18 miles across.
By using this data to simulate the optimal mix of wind and solar, the researchers demonstrated significant cost reductions. In New England, for instance, they found that prioritizing areas with nighttime winds worked better than simply choosing the windiest locations. In Texas, they discovered that combining westerly morning winds with onshore evening breezes effectively balanced supply.
Finding complementarity. When companies prioritize only the sunniest or windiest locations, they often create oversupply in regions with the most renewable infrastructure. This surplus energy ends up wasted without sufficient storage capacity.
MIT’s optimization method addresses this issue by maximizing temporal complementarity between wind and solar production. For instance, planners could locate wind farms in areas with strong nighttime winds and place solar installations in spots that extend energy production into the evening.
The benefits of this approach. By choosing sites where wind and solar production peaks offset each other, companies reduce the need for battery storage to meet peak electricity demand.
Better siting of renewables also minimizes reliance on natural gas for grid stability and cuts the cost of integrating renewables. According to MIT, this solution requires just one adjustment: Planning renewable installations with high-resolution climate data and models that prioritize complementarity over sheer production hours.
Image | Karsten Würth (Unsplash)
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