Hi,
I have access to the monthly data for electricity generation from RE sources like wind, solar, biomass and small hydro. I need to calculate the hourly electricity generated. What approach should I use? Kindly suggest.
Hello @priyankaiit Have you looked at the renewables.ninja project for wind and solar PV output? I don’t know what the coverage for India is like, but if it is lacking you could help out? Biomass and hydro will need to be based on the local context, but that information should be easier to estimate and is less volatile than wind and PV.
Hello @robbie.morrison, checked in renewables. ninja project. Wind and solar PV output are available for India.
@priyankaiit, @robbie.morrison: I’m afraid it is not possible to derive reasonably accurate hourly data for biomass and small hydro from monthly data. Small hydro is heavily dependent on rainfall patterns and biomass (particularly bagasse cogeneration) is dependent on feedstock availability which is again dependent on weather and cropping pattern. If historic hourly data is available for a few years, something reasonable could be derived for future years.
Hello @sriharid, I have not yet come across any source where hourly RE (biomass and hydro) generation data for India is available (not even historic data), nor did I find it in any research paper. Could you help if you know any?
Hello @priyankaiit You may have to go “upstream” and build your own model to estimate hydro and biomass potentials from more primary data such as stream flows, rainfall, land availability, crop yields, spot prices, and competition with food and fibre. You may get lucky and find someone has already done this exercise for India. That information can then be imported into your energy model and, because both biomass and hydro water can be stored, your model will need to make endogenous decisions about hour-by-hour usage. Which, of course, is your desired output. Regarding suitable methodologies, I would start by looking at recent IPCC reports and fan out from there. Bioenergy potentials, in particular, have attracted considerable work over the decades. Hydro system modeling is similarly well developed but more specialized. To go one step further, the OSeMOSYS model can investigate integrated energy and water management (search term “nexus”), if you need to broaden your scope. HTH.
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