Variability Multi-year upv values

[JPMartinezClaeys]

When inspecting the values of the multi-year variability of resource capacity in inputs/variability/multi_year/upv_reference_ba.h5 I noticed that the maximum value that these array contains is approximately 0.746 and I was wondering why it never reaches a value of 1.

In the Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) Model Documentation: Version 2020 it is mentioned "Each eligible UPV site is characterized by a raw hourly (8,760) irradiance profile that is representative of the solar resource within a 10 km2 contiguous area. Each of these UPV sites are compiled into supply curves for each of the 134 ReEDS BAs with 9 PV resource classes, which are further differentiated by cost to connect to the transmission network (process described in Section 6.3). The resource classes reflect different resource qualities based on the annual average global horizontal irradiance (GHI) reported by the latest National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB), assuming a tilt angle equal to the latitude (Table 4).". When inspecting the NSRDB visualizer it's possible to observe that the US has less radiation relative to other countries.

Given this I have a few questions that I appreciate could be answered:

1. Where is it possible to find the input processing file to construct the inputs/variability/multi_year/upv-reference_ba.h5 file?
2. Is the explanation of the value being capped at .75 for the US the fact that values are normalized for the international database where there are other countries with higher levels of radiation?
3. If the latter explanation is true, what explains that capacity factors for onshore-wind are 1 in the U.S. in the inputs/variability/multi_year/wind-ons-reference_ba.h5

Thanks for your answer.

[wesleyjcole]

The UPV profiles in ReEDS use DC capacity factor with an inverter loading ratio of 1.34. 0.746 * 1.34 = 1, so the capacity factors still reach 1 when converted to AC values.

The scripts used to create the .h5 files are found in the hourlize folder (https://github.com/NREL/ReEDS-2.0/tree/main/hourlize).

[JPMartinezClaeys]

Thanks @wesleyjcole