Price impact and long-term profitability of energy storage

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how energy storage affects electricity prices and assesses the long-term profitability of storage assets amid increasing renewable energy integration and energy transition scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework combining optimal storage operation, market equilibrium modeling, and stochastic price processes to evaluate storage profitability.

Findings

Storage revenues increase with renewable penetration.

Higher storage capacity leads to increased profit potential.

Price impact of storage causes higher price volatility.

Abstract

We study the price impact of storage facilities in electricity markets and analyze the long-term profitability of these facilities in prospective scenarios of energy transition. To this end, we begin by characterizing the optimal operating strategy for a stylized storage system, assuming an arbitrary exogenous price process. Following this, we determine the equilibrium price in a market comprising storage systems (acting as price takers), renewable energy producers, and conventional producers with a defined supply function, all driven by an exogenous demand process. The price process is characterized as a solution to a fully coupled system of forward-backward stochastic differential equations, for which we establish existence and uniqueness under appropriate assumptions. We finally illustrate the impact of storage on intraday electricity prices through numerical examples and show how the revenues of storage agents may evolve in prospective energy transition scenarios from RTE, the French energy electricity network operator, taking into account both the increasing penetration of renewable energies and the self-cannibalization effect of growing storage capacity. We find that both the average revenues and the interquantile ranges increase in all scenarios, highlighting higher expected profits and higher risk for storage assets.