Research on Application and Benefits of Energy Storage Systems

¹ State Grid Energy Research Institute Co., Ltd., Beijing 102209, China
² State Grid Corporation of China, Beijing, 100017, China

Abstract

At present, Energy storage systems are widely used in power supply, power grid and end-users system. There have been extensive application explorations in most application scenarios in China, such as smoothing power fluctuation and output tracking of new energy sources, assisting conventional units to participate in frequency modulation, peak-shaving frequency modulation of the power grid, system standby, peak-valley arbitrage of the load side, as well as demand reduction. This paper firstly investigates the typical operation modes of energy storage applied to new energy consumption scenarios, and analyzes three important technical approaches in order to promote new energy consumption, such as energy storage to stabilize fluctuation, tracking output and peak load balancing. Secondly, to evaluate the economic benefits of energy storage allocation in new energy projects in different regions of China by using the self-developed software for economic analysis of new energy and comprehensive energy system; thereafter the strategic suggestions for energy storage allocation in different regions are proposed. The results show that it is economical for wind power owners to build Pumped Thermal Energy Storage (PTES) and it is even cheaper to purchase PTES by wind power owners than to build electrochemical energy storage (EES) batteries by users when the same conditions of energy storage applies. Owner-built and owner-allocated Photovoltaic (PV) power station is poor in economy. Under the same energy storage condition, when the allocated energy of 1MW PV power generation is less than 200 kW, EES is relatively more economical than PTES.