Storage Control for Carbon Emission Reduction: Opportunities and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper explores how energy storage systems can be utilized to reduce carbon emissions in power systems, especially in the absence of carbon tax incentives, by proposing a dynamic programming control method.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to control storage for emission reduction without relying on carbon tax incentives, addressing non-convex optimization challenges.

Findings

Storage provides valuable flexibility for emission reduction.

The proposed algorithm effectively evaluates storage value in emission control.

Storage control can reduce emissions even without explicit carbon pricing.

Abstract

Storage is vital to power systems as it provides the urgently needed flexibility to the system. Meanwhile, it can contribute more than flexibility. In this paper, we study the possibility of utilizing storage system for carbon emission reduction. The opportunity arises due to the pending implementation of carbon tax throughout the world. Without the right incentive, most system operators have to dispatch the generators according to the merit order of the fuel costs, without any control for carbon emissions. However, we submit that storage may provide necessary flexibility in carbon emission reduction even without carbon tax. We identify the non-convex structure to conduct storage control for this task and propose an easy to implement dynamic programming algorithm to investigate the value of storage in carbon emission reduction.