CLIMAX is a tool to identify optimal spatial distributions and shares of wind and solar photovoltaic power installations across a selected region. The optimization process pursues to minimize the deviations of the total wind-plus-solar production from a given curve, while guaranteeing a certain minimum production.
Here CLIMAX can be run online to find the spatial distributions and shares of each technology that minimize the monthly anomalies of the production respect to the mean annual cycle of production. For this online application, ERA5 (Hersbach et al. 2020) hourly data of surface downward solar radiation, surface wind speed, surface air temperature and 100-m height wind speed for the period 1979-2020 were transformed into series of wind and solar capacity factor (CF) using simple assumptions, as in Jerez & Trigo (2013) for the wind and Jerez et al. (2015) for the solar CF, and used for the purpose. Further details are provided in each of the steps comprising the process and in the README file (full methodological details there).
The underlying open-source codes can be accesed at https://github.com/soniajerez/CLIMAX or downloaded here (last version), and used for any other application or target. Please read the accompanying README file.
The reference paper is:
Jerez, S., Barriopedro, D., García-López, A., Lorente-Plazas, R., Somoza, A. M., Turco, M., Carrillo, J., and Trigo, R. M. (2023). An action-oriented approach to make the most of the wind and solar power complementarity. Earth's Future, 11, e2022EF003332. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF003332
Selection of the target region.
Identification of sub-regions, within the selected target region, with homogeneous temporal variability of the time series of monthly anomalies of the solar CF.
Identification of sub-regions, within the selected target region, with homogeneous temporal variability of the time series of monthly anomalies of the wind CF.
Identification of the optimal shares of each technology in each sub-region.