The transition to renewable energy systems causes increased decentralization of the energy supply. Solar parks are built to increase renewable energy penetration and to supply local communities that become increasingly self-sufficient. These parks are generally installed in rural areas where electricity grid distribution capacity is limited. This causes the produced energy to create grid congestion. Temporary storage can be a solution. In addition to batteries, which are most suitable for intraday storage, hydrogen provides a long-term storage option and can be used to overcome seasonal mismatches in supply and demand. In this paper, we examine the operational decisions related to storing energy using hydrogen, and buying from or selling to the grid considering grid capacity limitations. We model the problem as a Markov decision process taking into account seasonal production and demand patterns, uncertain solar energy generation, and local electricity prices. We show that ignoring seasonal demand and production patterns is suboptimal. In addition, we show that the introduction of a hydrogen storage facility for a solar farm in rural areas may lead to positive profits, whereas this is loss-making without storage facilities. In a sensitivity analysis, we show that only if distribution capacity is too small, hydrogen storage does not lead to profits and reduced congestion at the cable connection. When the distribution capacity is constrained, a higher storage capacity leads to more buying-related actions from the electricity grid to prevent future shortages and to exploit price differences. This leads to more congestion at the connected cable and is an important insight for policy-makers and net-operators.
Seasonal climate variations affect electricity demand, which in turn affects month-to-month electricity planning and operations. Electricity system planning at the monthly timescale can be improved by adapting climate forecasts to estimate electricity demand and utilizing energy models to estimate monthly electricity generation and associated operational costs. The objective of this paper is to develop and test a computationally efficient model that can support seasonal planning while preserving key aspects of system operation over hourly and daily timeframes. To do so, an energy system optimi…
Electricity storage systems (ESS) are hailed by many scholars and practitioners as a key element of the future electricity systems and a key step toward the transition to renewables . Nonetheless, the global speed of ESS implementation is relatively slow, and among possible reasons is the lack of viable business models. We developed an agent-based model to simulate the behavior of ESS within the Dutch electricity market. We adopted an exploratory modeling analysis (EMA) approach to investigate the effects of two specific business models on the value of ESS from the perspective of both investor…
There has been growing interest in integrating hydrogen storage into power grids with high renewable penetration levels. The economic benefits and power grid reliability are both essential for hydrogen storage integration. In this paper, an annual scheduling model (ASM) for energy hubs (EH) coupled power grids is proposed to investigate the annual benefits of seasonal hydrogen storage (SHS). Each energy hub consists of hydrogen storage, electrolyzers, and fuel cells. The electrical and hydrogen energy can be exchanged on the bus with the energy hub. The physical constraints for both grids and …
A Comparative Analysis of Nigeria's Power Sector with and without Grid-Scale Storage: Future Implications for Emission and Renewable Energy Integration
Arbitrage is one important revenue source for energy storage in electricity markets. However, a large amount of storage in the market will impact the energy price and reduce potential revenues. This can lead to strategic behaviors of profit-seeking storage investors. To study the investors' strategic storage investments, we formulate a non-cooperative game between competing investors. Each investor decides the storage investment over a long investment horizon, and operates the storage for arbitrage revenues in the daily electricity market. Different investors can deploy storage with different …
Sharing economy has disrupted many industries. We foresee that electricity storage systems could be the enabler for sharing economy in electricity sector, though its implementation is a delicate task. Unlike in the 2-tier Time-of-Use (ToU) pricing, where greedy arbitrage policy can achieve the maximal electricity bill savings, most existing ToU schemes consist of multiple tiers, which renders the arbitrage challenging. The difficulty comes from the hedging against multiple tiers and the coupling between the decisions across the day. In this work, we focus on designing the energy sharing mechan…
Effects of charging and discharging capabilities on trade-offs between model accuracy and computational efficiency in pumped thermal electricity storage
How flexible do we need to be? Using electricity systems models to identify optimal designs for flexible carbon capture storage system for gas-fired power plants
Energy storage technologies are key to improving grid flexibility in the presence of increasing amounts of intermittent renewable generation. We propose an insurance contract that suitably compensates energy storage systems for providing flexibility. Such a contract provides a wider range of market opportunities for these systems while also incentivizing higher renewable penetration in the grid. We consider a day-ahead market in which generators, including renewables and storage owners, bid to be scheduled for the next operating day. Due to production uncertainty, renewable generators may be u…
Community electricity storage systems for multiple applications promise benefits over household electricity storage systems. More economical flexibility options such as demand response and sector coupling might reduce the market size for storage facilities. This paper assesses the economic performance of community electricity storage systems by taking competitive flexibility options into account. For this purpose, an actor-related, scenario-based optimization framework is applied. The results are in line with the literature and show that community storage systems are economically more efficien…
Ambitious renewable portfolio standards motivate the incorporation of energy storage resources (ESR) as sources of flexibility. While the United States government aims to promote ESR participation in electricity markets, work on market designs for properly remunerating ESRs is still lacking. In this paper, we propose a new energy market clearing framework that incorporates ESR systems. The new market design is computationally attractive in that it avoids mixed-integer formulations and formulations with complementarity constraints. Moreover, compared to previous market designs, our market decom…
In this paper, we propose a high-level Stochastic steady-state model to analyze the value of co-located energy storage systems for wind power producers that participate in an electricity market through Forward or Day Ahead contracts. In particular, we try to find optimal sizing and contracting and stationary operating policies for profit maximization in the long-run. We obtain a stylized model calibrated to actual wind power production and electricity wholesale price data that allows us to asses the value of storage size and perform sensitivity analysis on key parameters such as contract price…
Distributed renewable energy systems are now widely installed in many buildings, transforming the buildings into electricity prosumers. Existing studies have developed some advanced building side controls that enable renewable energy sharing and that aim to optimise building-cluster-level performance via regulating the energy storage charging/ discharging. However, the flexible demand shifting ability of electric vehicles is not considered in these building side controls. For instance, the electric vehicle charging will usually start once they are plugged into charging stations. But, in such c…
Mobile energy storage devices (MESDs) operate as medium- or large-sized batteries that can be loaded onto electric trucks and connected to charging stations to provide various ancillary services for distribution grids. This paper proposes a new strategy for MESD operation, in which their power outputs and paths are co-optimally scheduled to minimize the total energy loss in both power and transportation networks. The distances moved by MESDs and time at different locations are modeled using a set of linear equations, considering the time-varying traffic flow. The linear transit model is integr…
An energy storage technology is valuable if it makes energy systems cheaper. Traditional ways to improve storage technologies are to reduce their costs; however, the cheapest energy storage is not always the most valuable in energy systems. Modern techno-economical evaluation methods try to address the cost and value situation but do not judge the competitiveness of multiple technologies simultaneously. This paper introduces the market potential method as a new complementary valuation method guiding innovation of multiple energy storage. The market potential method derives the value of technol…
Electricity distribution networks that contain large photovoltaic solar systems can experience power flows between customers. These may create both technical and socio-economic challenges. This paper establishes how these challenges can be addressed through the combined deployment of Community-scale Energy Storage (CES) and local network tariffs. Our study simulates the operation of a CES under a range of local network tariff models, using current Australian electricity prices and current network prices as a reference. We assess the financial outcomes for solar and non-solar owning customers a…
We formulate the optimal energy arbitrage problem for a piecewise linear cost function for energy storage devices using linear programming (LP). The LP formulation is based on the equivalent minimization of the epigraph. This formulation considers ramping and capacity constraints, charging and discharging efficiency losses of the storage, inelastic consumer load and local renewable generation in presence of net-metering which facilitates selling of energy to the grid and incentivizes consumers to install renewable generation and energy storage. We consider the case where the consumer loads, el…
We present an online stochastic model predictive control framework for demand charge management for a grid-connected consumer with attached electrical energy storage. The consumer we consider must satisfy an inflexible but stochastic electricity demand, and also receives a stochastic electricity inflow. The optimization problem formulated solves a stochastic cost minimization problem, with given weather forecast scenarios converted into forecast demand and inflow. We introduce a novel weighting scheme to account for cases where the optimization horizon spans multiple demand charge periods. The…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. power sector witnessed remarkable electricity demand changes in many geographical regions. these changes were evident in population-dense cities. This paper incorporates a techno-economic analysis of energy storage systems to investigate the pandemic's influence on ESS development, In particular, we employ a linear program-based revenue maximization model to capture the revenues of ESS from participating in the electricity market, by performing arbitrage on energy trading, and regulation market, by providing regulation services to stabilize the grid's fre…
Deep energy decarbonization cannot be achieved without high penetration of renewables. At higher renewable energy penetrations, the variability and intermittent nature of solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity can cause ramping issues with existing fossil fuel generation, requiring longer term energy storage to increase the reliability of grid operation. A proton exchange membrane electrolyzer can produce H2and serves as a utility controllable load. The produced H2 can then be stored and converted back into electricity, or mixed with natural gas, or used as transportation fuel, or chemical feedst…
Constant rise in energy consumption that comes with the population growth and introduction of new technologies has posed critical issues such as efficient energy management on the consumer side. That has elevated the importance of the use of renewable energy sources, particularly photovoltaic (PV) system and wind turbine. This work models and discusses design options based on the hybrid power system of grid and battery storage. The effects of installed capacity on renewable penetration (RP) and cost of electricity (COE) are investigated for each modality. For successful operation of hybrid pow…
A high share of distributed photovoltaic (PV) generation in low-voltage networks may lead to over-voltage, and line/transformer overloading. To mitigate these issues, we investigate how advanced electricity tariffs could ensure safe grid operation hile enabling building owners to recover their investment in a PV and storage system. We show that dynamic volumetric electricity prices trigger economic opportunities for large investments in PV and battery capacity but lead to more pressure on the grid while capacity and block rate tariffs mitigate over-voltage and decrease line loading issues. How…
In this paper, we address an optimal management problem of community energy storage in the real-time electricity market under a stochastic renewable environment. In a real-time electricity market, complete market information may not be assessable for a strategic participant, hence we propose a paradigm that uses partial information including the forecast of real-time prices and slopes of the aggregate supply curve to model the price impact of storage use in the price-maker storage management problem. As a price maker, the community energy storage can not only earn profits through energy arbitr…
