Assessing Potential of Renewable Energy Sources in Iran through Practical and Analytical Data

Iran has high potentials for integrating renewable energy resources into its future power generation portfolio. This paper presents an analytical study on the potential of the wind and solar power plant, called variable renewable energy (VRE), in Iran. Although it is common to use the capacity factor for comparison of renewable potentials in different areas, this paper presents useful analytical data of the capacity credit of the VRE resources in all the provinces of Iran. Because of the uncertainty of the VREs, there may be high operational risks in their high penetration levels into the power system. This paper uses the confidence level concept to determine the availability risk of the VREs in each province. As the system flexibility requirements should be considered in the high penetration levels of VRE, this paper provides useful analytical data about the variability of the output power of VREs in each area. These variability data can be used by the energy planning models to provide enough flexibility requirements into the future power generation portfolio.