Closed toddmedema closed 2 months ago
Perhaps "capacity factor" is the best way to estimate this
Thought: How much would I expect the climate to meaningfully change in a way that would impact solar/wind capacity factor? Uhhh, without getting into complex climate change modeling, minimally... so, then, I could argue that capacity factor could just be locally-calculated once
Which would also work well since that particular logic of generating facilities isn't used much - only in BuildFacilities and InitGame, so it's ok if it works a bit to actually forecast out.
So, basically, expand the export function GENERATORS
in Facilities.tsx to take in (location? weather?) and calculate custom capacity factors for solar and wind — and then, of course, verify that the updates flow through and make sense.
For the record, existing values on master when starting SF 2020 scenario, 200MW: wind: 62MW/year, $27.4/mwh, capacityFactor: 0.31 solar: 44MW/year, $25.1/mwh, capacityFactor: 0.22
Okay, so we made this change, and wind looks good... but solar's capacity factor plummeted to 0.05; why? Just checked and it does look like the irradiance average for 2020 SF is actually that low. 6% in PIT, 9% in puerto rico. But the US average is 16-28% depending on the state... https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39832
Even removing cloudiness from the equation, that only bumps it up to 11% SF / 13% puerto rico
Removing the recently added compensation factor for latitude gets it up to 17% and 20%, so I think that was redundant with the existing day length modifier. Still not super accurate / could use work, but way closer than it was. Good enough for MVP.
It's currently based on a single hardcoded capacity factor, obviously not correct
For simplicity in determining "average output", can use the weather for the full upcoming year as a model year, e.g. don't need to simulate/forecast every year of service life uniquely