Sustainable power purchase contracts for local industries from floating-solar and pumped-hydro integration

Hari Raghavendran, Derek Bunn and P. Srinivasan

Abstract

This paper analyses the technical and business cases for a hybrid floating-solar and pumped-hydro facility to provide secure, baseload power to local industrial and commercial users through bilateral power purchase agreement contracting and private wire connections. Based upon a realistic hydrological setting with a range of assumptions for both the floating-solar and pumped-hydro installations, daily operations are optimized to provide different levels of secure baseload power purchase agreement contracts. This research shows how the premium for baseload contracts depends on the size of the contracts and the size of the solar installation. The premiums are the opportunity costs to the hydro operators from potential sales to the wholesale market. We find that the premiums are affordable to local users, and that the combination of solar and pumped storage thereby enables a hydro operator to offer higher levels of secure baseload power, throughout the year, to local industries where the national power resources are otherwise unreliable.