The Potential of Variable Renewable Energy Sources in Mexico: A Temporally Evaluated and Geospatially Constrained Techno-Economical Assessment

Abstract

Due to the increasing global importance of decarbonizing human activities, especially the production of electricity, the optimal deployment of renewable energy technologies will play a crucial role in future energy systems. To accomplish this, particular attention must be accorded to the geospatial and temporal distribution of variable renewable energy sources (VRES), such as wind and solar radiation, in order to match electricity supply and demand. This study presents a techno-economical assessment of four energy technologies in the hypothetical context of Mexico in 2050, namely: onshore and offshore wind turbines and open-field and rooftop photovoltaics. A land eligibility analysis incorporating physical, environmental, and sociopolitical eligibility constraints and individual turbine and photovoltaic park simulations, drawing on 39 years of climate data, is performed for individual sites across the country in an effort to determine the installable potential and the associated levelized costs of electricity. The results reveal that up to 54 PWh of renewable electricity can be produced at a levelized cost of electricity of less than 70 EUR·MWh−1. Around 91% (49 PWh) of this electricity would originate from 23 TW of open-field photovoltaic parks that could occupy up to 578,000 km2 of eligible land across the country. The remaining 9% (4.8 PWh) could be produced by 1.9 TW of onshore wind installations allocated to approximately 68,500 km2 of eligible land that is almost fully adjacent to three mountainous zones. The combination of rooftop photovoltaic and offshore wind turbines accounts for a very small share of less than 0.03% of the overall techno-economical potential.

How offshore wind could become economically attractive in low-resource regions like Indonesia

“…Therefore, we argue that thresholds of 7 m/s and higher as used in literature ( Deng et al., 2015 ; Obane et al., 2021 ; Vinhoza and Schaeffer, 2021 ) might be too restrictive. Instead, we recommend a threshold of 4 m/s as already done by Peña Sánchez et al. (2021) .…”

“…To address these shortcomings, we study the technical and economic potential of offshore wind in mild-resource regions, with Indonesia as our representative case. It is important to note that in this study we assess the technical and economic potentials separately, which do not cover the overall techno-economic potential as presented in existing studies ( Caglayan et al., 2019 ; Mattar and Guzmán-Ibarra, 2017 ; Peña Sánchez et al., 2021 ). The focus is on turbines designed for low wind speeds: first, to draw attention to the currently overlooked but considerable potential of mild-resource regions in making a significant contribution to a rapid energy transition and second, to understand the overall offshore wind potential in Indonesia.…”

Energy Loss Analysis of Distributed Rooftop Photovoltaics in Industrial Parks

“…Therefore, how to accurately analyze photovoltaic operating losses has become a focus of attention of the three parties [11][12][13]. Domestic and foreign scholars or enterprises have integrated the local monitoring data of photovoltaic power plants, environmental meteorological data of power plants, power plant fault information data, and other related information data, and built a unified information data monitoring and analysis platform, a comprehensive platform for power station operation management, and a data analysis platform based on big data [14,15]. What's more, reference [16] investigated residential distribution networks with uncertain loads and photovoltaic distributed generation using datadriven models.…”