Modeled Impacts of Solar Forecast Error on Utility Production Cost

Solar forecast error can be represented in electric utility production cost modeling to assess impacts of uncertainty in different scenarios. We use reforecasts (a.k.a., historical forecasts, hindcasts) that were developed to be concurrent with synthetic solar generation profiles (matching each hour in the same year), along with asynchronous forecasts (i.e., with errors remapped from different hours and/or years), to explore impacts on model results. We demonstrate that production cost increases non-linearly with forecast error, and that our method for remapping asynchronous forecast errors to a solar generation profile produces results that are similar to the concurrent forecasts, but with about 20\% lower cost impacts due to forecast error.