Lowest-Cost, Firm PV Without Conventional Backup: Supply Shaping Through Curtailment

Conventional wisdom considers PV output curtailment as a last resort to be avoided at all costs. We argue quite the opposite: curtailment, coupled with strategic oversizing of generation assets, is the key to achieving very high PV penetration at the lowest cost. In this paper, we employ a model that optimizes the use of this novel curtailment strategy, geographic dispersion, storage and demand-side management to deliver cheap, firm renewable power at high penetration without conventional generation. We use this model to quantify the premium that must be paid to transform low-cost yet intermittent solar PV into a firm, dispatchable resource at a total levelized cost below eight cents per kWh. solar resource, supply shaping, curtailment, storage, grid integration, high penetration.