Research

A business-oriented approach for battery energy storage placement in power systems

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Abstract

Battery energy storage systems (BESSs) are gaining increasing importance in the low carbon transformation of power systems. Their deployment in the power grid, however, is currently challenged by the economic viability of BESS projects. To drive the growth of the BESS industry, private, commercial, and institutional investments in large-scale BESS projects are needed. For financiers and investors, choosing an appropriate BESS installation location is a crucial task that requires important considerations. However, so far, studies targeting the BESS placement problem have mainly focused on minimizing operational losses, solving power quality issues, and improving the voltage profile of the system. Implementing such approaches only considers the operational feasibility of BESS at the installation site while ignoring its business feasibility. Therefore, in this paper, we approach the BESS placement problem from a business viewpoint by conducting a stage-level investigation of BESS projects. First, we identify the factors impacting the business feasibility of placement decisions in projects’ construction, connection, operation, and disposal stages and propose cost and time effective measures for making them business friendly. We investigate several factors such as profitability of grid services, integrability of renewable resources, affordability of connection charges, and the usability of BESS capacity. Second, we investigate the business potential of placing BESSs in different grid-levels of the power system and examine BESS connection procedures at those levels. Third, we implement the proposed approach for installing a BESS in the Danish island of Bornholm, for which, we investigate multiple locations of the Bornholm power system.