Centralized energy storage

Small-scale energy storage systems can be centrally coordinated by "aggregation" to offer different services to the grid, such as operational flexibility and peak shaving. This paper shows how centralized coordination vs. distributed operation of residential electricity storage (home batteries) could affect the savings of owners.

Distributed energy storage is a solution for increasing self-consumption of variable renewable energy such as solar and wind energy at the end user site. Small-scale energy storage systems can be centrally coordinated by "aggregation" to offer different services to the grid, such as operational flexibility and peak shaving.

The impact of centralized coordination of storage resources on the consumer's annual electricity costs generally increases with the level of variable renewable generation capacity in the electricity system while inversely related to level of flexible supply capacity.

Energy storage systems allow energy consumption to be separated in time from the production of energy, whether it be electrical or thermal energy. The storing of electricity typically occurs in chemical (e.g., lead acid batteries or lithium-ion batteries, to name just two of the best known) or mechanical means (e.g., pumped hydro storage).

These results highlight the centralized ESS approach as a more economically advantageous and efficient solution, providing superior financial returns and optimized energy management for multi-tenant buildings.

The terms EES, “electricity storage”, “energy storage”, and “storage” are interchangeably used in this paper for referring to technologies that can store electricity and discharge it back at a reasonable response time. Examples of such technologies include secondary electro-chemical batteries, flow batteries, pumped hydropower storage (PHS), etc.