Techno-economic analysis of energy storage systems for application in wind farms

The objective of this paper is to analyse reduction in wind power variability through aggregation and use of energy storage systems. A key focus is to evaluate the impact of regulatory framework in addition to the capital expenditure to ascertain techno-economic feasibility of energy storage systems in wind farm applications. A generic techno-economic is developed which takes into account the effects of regulatory framework in addition to the technical and economic features of storage options. Existing wind farms from South Australia are used as test cases. First, a detailed quantitative analysis is performed to establish the variability associated with individual wind farms and the aggregations of their power outputs. Then, the appropriateness of a number of existing energy storage types are evaluated using the developed techno-economic model. Relationships between wind farm sizes, wind farm variability levels, storage capacity requirements, storage costs and storage payback times are determined and discussed for both current and potential future economic and regulatory scenarios. It is found that regulatory framework can be of paramount importance in ascertaining the economic feasibility of energy storage. For example, if the ramp-rate violation penalty (determined to be $8.89/MW/min) is doubled, then the payback time of energy storage capital investment is found to reduce from 5.32 years to 2.52 years. It is also found that larger wind farms require smaller energy storage capacity and smaller wind farms generally results in a shorter energy storage system payback times. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.