Temporal Solar Photovoltaic Generation Capacity Reduction From Wildfire Smoke

Abstract

Wildfire smoke and other particulate matter can substantially inhibit solar photovoltaic (PV) generation production. While solar PV facilities may not be located in areas with a high fire risk, smoke from wildfires can travel hundreds of kilometers impacting a large number of facilities. This paper proposes a geospatial wildfire PV capacity model to quantify the anticipated temporal reduction in PV capacity due to wildfire smoke. A case study using data for two time periods from the 2020 California wildfires and real utility scale solar generation data evidences the model’s high accuracy. Results argue that wildfire smoke can cause significant temporal solar generation capacity reductions over wide geographic regions. Application of the proposed model to inform power system resiliency planning is demonstrated for two use cases: generation scheduling and siting. With meteorological service providers beginning to release smoke forecasts, our geospatial wildfire PV capacity model enables balancing authorities to make use of this information to proactively schedule generation to compensate for reductions in PV capacity. The trained model also produces geospatial derate maps that can enable generation developers to consider historical capacity derates due to smoke when making siting or planning decisions.

Keywords

• Photovoltaic power generation
• power system operation
• resilience
• solar photovoltaic generation
• wildfire smoke effects