A new methodology to easy integrate complementarity criteria in the resource assessment process for hybrid power plants: Offshore wind and floating PV

• Hybridization of technologies is a good option to optimize renewable energy resources. • Complementarity of resources is one of the key criteria to evaluate suitability of areas. • An index focused on wind and solar characteristics is defined to evaluate the complementarity: CIWS_align. • The CIWS_align index avoids deficiencies of previous criteria and overestimation caused by time delays. • A methodology that allows identify better areas in initial stages of hybrid power plants promotion. The maturity of technologies of energy generation from renewable sources produces tense an increasing interest on hybrid power plant implementation. The combination of different resources, as wind and solar, introduces concepts as complementarity that must be taken into account when suitability of emplacements is made. This work presents a methodology to evaluate a geographic area under the perspective of installing hybrid wind and PV power plants. Therefore, it proposes a way to evaluate the complementarity among both resources that would avoid overestimation due to time delays and it also would offer a holistic procedure to identify the most suitable locations to host one of these hybrid power plants. The methodology is illustrated by evaluating the Off-shore Spanish area to install wind and floating PV plants and is flexible to adapt the evaluation according to dimension of each technology in the future plants. It is shown how the complementarity criteria as input in the site selection process improves the ordered of emplacements obtained when only resource amount is taken into account. The methodology can be used to identify more suitable areas in the initial stages of promoting hybrid power plants. Data from ERA5 and CAMS are used to analyze long term behavior of wind and solar resources.