Economic evaluation of energy storage integrated with wind power

Abstract Energy storage can further reduce carbon emission when integrated into the renewable generation. The integrated system can produce additional revenue compared with wind-only generation. The challenge is how much the optimal capacity of energy storage system should be installed for a renewable generation. Electricity price arbitrage was considered as an effective way to generate benefits when connecting to wind generation and grid. This wind-storage coupled system can make benefits through a time-of-use (TOU) tariff. A proportion of electricity is stored from the wind power system at off-peak time (low price), and released to the customer at peak time (high price). Thus, extra benefits are added to the wind-storage system compared with wind-only system. A Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm based optimization model was constructed for this integrated system including constraints of state-of-charge (SOC), maximum storage and release powers etc. The proposed optimization model was to obtain the optimal capacity of energy storage system and its operation control strategy of the storage-release processes, to maximize the revenue of the coupled system considering the arbitrage. Furthermore, the energy storage can provide reserve ancillary services for the grid, which generates benefits. The benefits of energy storage system through reserve ancillary services were also calculated. A case study was analyzed with respect to yearly wind generation and electricity price profiles. The benefit compared with no energy storage scenario was calculated. The impact of the energy storage efficiency, cost and lifetime was considered. The sensitivity and optimization capacity under various conditions were calculated. An optimization capacity of energy storage system to a certain wind farm was presented, which was a significant value for the development of energy storage system to integrate into a wind farm.