Wind and Solar Power Resource Availability Assessment Using Market Monitoring Data

The central European electricity market transparency platform, officially launched on 5 January 2015, provides access to a large amount of power system data, including aggregated power generation time series per type of generation. These high-resolution, simultaneous time series available for most European countries offer valuable input for the resource assessment of the variable renewable energy sources in the context of security of supply. However, past reviews identified several issues regarding data quality. Therefore, data quality considerations and the application of suitable data-cleaning techniques are essential prerequisites for the further use and proper interpretation of data. Also, impacts resulting from the continuous development of the power system, such as capacity additions, withdrawals, changes in the geographic distribution of the generation fleet, and the evolution of the technology, need to be considered. Relying on the time series of 2015–2022 as input for wind and solar power resource availability and variability assessments, we analyzed several data quality dimensions. Highlighting the limitations, we demonstrated how the datasets could be used for high-level resource assessments in power system analysis at regional or national level.