Technical and economical evaluation of a PV plant with energy storage

The use of energy storage is a key issue in the deployment of non-dispatchable distributed renewable energy sources inside the electrical infrastructure. As this concept has been around for nearly two decades, many critical issues about the efficient and economical use of battery-based electrical energy storage are still present. Short life, high cost and constraints on power management of battery systems are the most serious drawbacks to their widespread applications. Energy management procedures are needed to optimize the use of battery energy fulfilling the RES and loads requirements without conflicting with the battery technological constraints. A MILP based procedure is used to define the optimal energy schedule of an electrical storage system subject to given profiles of RES production, load consumption and electrical grid energy prices. Aging effects of batteries are taken into account and their economic influence is assessed using different formulations of the cost functional.