India plans to add 100 GW of solar electric power generation by 2022 to an existing system (with an installed capacity of close to 330 GW, as on January 2018, from all sources). Selection of sites for such a large infrastructure investment is definitely an important decision.

We examine the potential for geographic smoothing of solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation using 13 months of observed power production from utility-scale plants in Gujarat, India. To our knowledge, this is the first published analysis of geographic smoothing of solar PV using actual generation data at high time resolution from utility-scale solar PV plants.