Energy storage applications for low voltage consumers in Uruguay

TL;DR

This paper investigates residential energy storage in Uruguay, focusing on energy arbitrage and reactive power compensation under new low-voltage consumer contracts, proposing a hierarchical control strategy to maximize end-user profits.

Contribution

It introduces a threshold-based hierarchical controller tailored to Uruguay's billing structure, enabling profitable energy storage operation without parameter sensitivity.

Findings

Storage can be profitable under certain contracts.

Reactive power compensation is primarily converter-driven.

Proposes optimal contract adjustments for non-profitable cases.

Abstract

Energy storage can be used for many applications in the Smart Grid such as energy arbitrage, peak demand shaving, power factor correction, energy backup to name a few, and can play a major role at increasing the capacity of power networks to host renewable energy sources. Often, storage control algorithms will need to be \textit{tailored} according to power networks billing structure, reliability restrictions, and other local power networks norms. In this paper we explore residential energy storage applications in Uruguay, one of the global leaders in renewable energies, where new low-voltage consumer contracts were recently introduced. Based on these billing mechanisms, we focus on energy arbitrage and reactive energy compensation with the aim of minimizing the cost of consumption of an end-user. Given that in the new contacts the buying and selling price of electricity are equal and that reactive power compensation is primarily governed by the installed converter, the storage operation is not sensitive to parameter uncertainties and, therefore, no lookahead is required for decision making. A threshold-based \textit{hierarchical} controller is proposed which decides on the optimal active energy for arbitrage and uses the remaining converter capacity for reactive power compensation, which is shown to increase end-user profit. Numerical results indicate that storage could be profitable, even considering battery degradation, under some but not all of the studied contracts. For the cases in which it is not, we propose the best-suited contract. Results presented here can be naturally applied whenever the tariff structure satisfies the hypothesis considered in this work.