Operational management of renewable energy systems with storage using an optimisation-based simulation methodology

Abstract

It has been widely recognised that renewable energy, such as wind, provides valuable benefits for the environment, human health, and the economy. Nevertheless, renewable energy has several drawbacks: high variability in its availability, uncertainty in its forecast, and difficulty in matching production to demand. The storage of energy would enable solving of most of these problems. In this paper, we obtain operative management policies for energy storage under two criteria: maximising the profit of selling the energy and maximising the reliability of the system as a provider of committed energy. Decisions take into account data concerning the structure of selling prices and penalties, as well as updated probabilistic wind speed forecasts. We use a sequence of rolling horizon stochastic optimisation problems to determine the parameters of the proposed management strategies. To solve these problems we propose a simulation-based optimisation methodology.

Keywords:

• simulation
• optimisation
• energy system
• storage
• management

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the research staff of the National Renewable Energy Centre in Spain (CENER) for technical support and advice in understanding energy storage systems. This paper has been supported in part by grant MTM2012-36025. The authors would like to extend their gratitude to the reviewers and guest editor for their insightful comments, which have increased the quality of this paper.