Maximising the value of electricity storage

By Iain Staffell, M. Rustomji. 2016

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Grid-scale energy storage promises to reduce the cost of decarbonising electricity, but is not yet economically viable. Either costs must fall, or revenue must be extracted from more of the services that storage provides the electricity system. To help understand the economic prospects for storage, we review the sources of revenue available and the barriers faced in accessing them. We then demonstrate a simple algorithm that maximises the profit from storage providing arbitrage with reserve under both perfect and no foresight, which avoids complex linear programming techniques. This is made open source and freely available to help promote further research. We demonstrate that battery systems in the UK could triple their profits by participating in the reserve market rather than just providing arbitrage. With no foresight of future prices, 75–95% of the optimal profits are gained. In addition, we model a battery combined with a 322 MW wind farm to evaluate the benefits of shifting time of delivery. The revenues currently available are not sufficient to justify the current investment costs for battery technologies, and so further revenue streams and cost reductions are required.

Subfields: Control and Systems Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72e2dc0da2a9df10d41b5a9d86d7f529fdfeb641

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Market design for a high-renewables European electricity system (2018, background): “Battery storage, as such, is unlikely to be viable for time-shifting supply in current electricity markets (Staffell and Rustomji, 2016).”
Short-term integration costs of variable renewable energy: Wind curtailment and balancing in Britain and Germany (2018, background): “In combination with decreasing technology costs of storage [133], marginal imbalance prices might make combining a wind farm with storage economic to avoid high imbalance charges [134].”
Comparative Review of Energy Storage Systems, Their Roles, and Impacts on Future Power Systems (2019, background): “SU(t) and time dependent model of electricity tariff [25].”