Sizing of a PV/Battery System Through Stochastic Control and Plant Aggregation

TL;DR

This paper proposes stochastic control strategies and plant aggregation to minimize the size of PV/Battery systems needed for efficient market operation, balancing performance and storage costs.

Contribution

It introduces two novel solutions—plant aggregation and intra-day market participation—to reduce BESS size requirements while maintaining performance.

Findings

Aggregation reduces PV generation uncertainty.

Intra-day market participation decreases BESS usage.

Both methods lower storage size needs effectively.

Abstract

The objective of this work is to reduce the storage dimensions required to operate a coupled photovoltaic (PV) and Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) in an electricity market, while keeping the same level of performance. Performance is measured either with the amount of errors between the energy sold on the market and the actual generation of the PV/BESS i.e. the imbalance, or directly with the revenue generated on the electricity market from the PV/BESS operation. Two solutions are proposed and tested to reduce the BESS size requirement. The first solution is to participate in electricity markets with an aggregation of several plants instead of a single plant, which effectively reduces the uncertainty of the PV power generation. The second is to participate in an intra-day market to reduce the BESS usage. To evaluate the effects of these two solutions on the BESS size requirement, we simulate the control of the PV/BESS system in an electricity market.