Proposta de metodologia para avaliação de complementariedade de geração hidráulica, solar e eólica em bacias hidrográficas brasileiras

Abstract

The hybridization of power plants constitutes an effective strategy to mitigate the variability of renewable sources such as wind and photovoltaic, thereby optimizing the utilization of natural resources through their complementarity. A thorough understanding of regional characteristics facilitates the identification of areas with greater potential, enabling strategic deployment and more efficient allocation of investments. Although the literature on complementarity in Brazil is relatively extensive, it remains predominantly limited to the assessment of two sources and often lacks robust justifications and statistical analyses to substantiate the methodologies adopted. Within this context, the present study proposes a comprehensive methodology to quantify natural complementarity in Brazilian river basins, considering the combinations of hydro–wind, hydro–photovoltaic, and photovoltaic–wind. The approach employs correlation coefficients well established in the literature, complemented by statistical tests to evaluate data distribution and select the most appropriate measure, in addition to the Innovative Trend Analysis with significance testing, a modern technique widely applied in meteorological studies that enhances the results by detecting growth or decline trends. Solar radiation and wind speed data, obtained from meteorological stations, were processed in Python to estimate energy generation and to calculate its correlation with Natural Energy Inflow, following consistency verification, distributional analysis, and outlier detection. The principal limitation encountered concerned the low quality of data provided by the Brazilian National Institute of Meteorology (INMET), which underscored the importance of rigorous preprocessing. The Pearson coefficient was not employed, as none of the basins satisfied the required assumptions, thereby reinforcing the relevance of a methodology that verifies such criteria and adopts alternatives such as the Kendall and Spearman coefficients. The application to six Brazilian river basins, considering monthly intervals between 2015 and 2024, demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The Tietê basin exhibited the highest complementarity between hydro and photovoltaic, whereas the Jacuí basin was the only one to present complementarity among all three source combinations in several months; in the remaining basins, positive correlation predominated in at least one of the combinations.