Environmental impacts of using energy storage aggregations to provide multiple services

Abstract

Battery Energy Storage (BES) can provide multiple local and grid services. Previous work developed models and optimization approaches for allocating the power and energy capacities of multiple batteries to different tasks, enabling them to provide multiple services simultaneously. In this work, we explore the ability of batteries providing three local services to additionally participate in frequency regulation. We formulate a deterministic optimization problem to select optimal energy and power allocations for each BES to each service and then estimate the environmental impacts of aggregate battery multitasking. Specifically, we compare the environmental impacts (measured indirectly by the energy losses and required battery capacity) of multitasking batteries to single-service batteries providing the same set of services. Our results show that aggregated BES multitasking leads to significant reductions in total BES losses and BES capacity needed to perform the designated services. We also explore the sensitivity of the results to local/grid service prices.