  This paper proposes a systematic framework to assess the complementarity of
renewable resources over arbitrary geographical scopes and temporal scales
which is particularly well-suited to exploit very large data sets of
climatological data. The concept of critical time windows is introduced, and a
spatio-temporal criticality indicator is proposed, consisting in a parametrised
family of scalar indicators quantifying the complementarity between renewable
resources in both space and time. The criticality indicator is leveraged to
devise a family of optimisation problems identifying sets of locations with
maximum complementarity under arbitrary geographical deployment constraints.
The applicability of the framework is shown in a case study investigating the
complementarity between the wind regimes in continental western Europe and
southern Greenland, and its usefulness in a power system planning context is
demonstrated. Besides showing that the occurrence of low wind power production
events can be significantly reduced on a regional scale by exploiting diversity
in local wind patterns, results highlight the fact that aggregating wind power
production sites located on different continents may result in a lower
occurrence of system-wide low wind power production events and indicate
potential benefits of intercontinental electrical interconnections.
