Hybrid park planning: wind farm with photovoltaics and storage
Hybrid park planning for a wind farm with PV: we plan your PV upgrade, with or without storage, and support the project through submission to the authorities.
Could your wind farm do with a PV upgrade? Then it is worth planning a hybrid park straight away. We develop combined energy projects in an integrated way, keeping technical, legal and ecological requirements in view. The idea behind it is simple: one site, one grid connection and one joint permit concept deliver more than a single technology. Anyone who plans wind and PV together from the start can coordinate permitting and grid planning and make better use of existing infrastructure. This includes the question of whether storage can usefully be added. As a PV solution for agricultural land, we offer the turnkey EWS Sonnenfeld®.
Technically, the grid connection is what matters most. Wind, PV and storage can be operated at a shared grid connection point even if the installed generating capacity exceeds the connection capacity (oversizing). The connection capacity remains the upper limit: feed-in must never exceed it, and peaks are limited where necessary. In return, long connection lines can be avoided if the nearest suitable grid connection point is far away with separate connections. The distance depends on the site and the available grid capacity and must be determined case by case. Existing cables, transformers and substations are also better utilised. Even in preliminary project development, the load profile analysis for wind turbines shows whether wind and PV can share the grid connection point.
Wind and photovoltaics complement each other in their generation profile: wind turbines reach significantly more full-load hours than PV, and balanced mixes cause less surplus that would have to be curtailed than plants of a single technology. East-west oriented, vertically mounted PV delivers more in the morning and evening than at the midday peak and so fits the load curve better. Storage smooths feed-in further and makes generation usable at other times of day. It should be sized according to benefit: larger batteries increase the levelised cost of electricity if the investment grows faster than the additional usable electricity, although this metric does not capture the value of flexibility. The solar side is described by the hybrid park planning for PV plants, and the storage side by the hybrid park planning with battery storage and grid.
Whether for wind power and photovoltaics alone or with a storage solution, we support you from the site assessment through the strategic environmental assessment to submission. Coordination with all relevant authorities is part of it. You thus get planning geared towards permittability. Whether the PV area and storage are covered by the zoning of the wind farm or need their own zoning must be assessed under the respective provincial law and the specific zoning, for example also in future acceleration areas. For combined construction projects, the environmental effects of the construction phase must also be considered together, for example airborne emissions such as dust in the air quality assessment for wind turbines. In this way, wind, PV and storage can be developed as one overall project.
