General indicator for techno-economic assessment of renewable energy resources

•The long-term implementation of renewable power system is simulated by new models.•The system’s techno-economic indicators are quantified.•A general renewable energy resource evaluation indicator is developed.•We evaluate three typical renewable energy resources in Hunan Province of China. Renewable energy is considered as a solution for mitigating energy crisis and environmental pollution. However, there are two main issues in techno-economic assessment of renewable energy resource: difficult to quantify assessment indicators and lack of a general indicator for multi-criteria evaluation. This study aims to develop a calculation methodology to quantify the techno-economic indicators including power generation, economic costs, incomes, and carbon emissions, through simulating the long-term implementation of solar, wind and biomass energy based renewable power systems. Moreover, by using normalization, weighting methods and Radar plot, all the indicators mentioned above are combined into a general evaluation indicator, which is able to provide a numerical result of multi-criteria quality evaluation of renewable energy resources. Hunan Province located in subtropical China where abundant of solar, wind and biomass energy resources, is studied as a case to present the evaluation methodology and its application. Through collecting the resource data of solar, wind and biomass energy and their facility costs data as the inputs, the long-term implementation of renewable power generation systems located in fourteen cities of Hunan Province are simulated; and then the numerical values of the general indicator are compared among different types of renewable energy resource. The general indicator evaluation results show that southern region including Yongzhou city have higher feasibility for wind power, while the eastern and northern areas including Loudi city have better feasibility of solar energy; for biomass energy resource assessment, the Huaihua system has the best feasibility while the Xiangtan system has the lowest among all the cities in Hunan province. The developed evaluation model and general indicator are able to provide a reference for investment decision making and subsidy policy optimizing.