Battery for wind energy storage system

For wind and solar power plants to reach their full potential, they need storage systems. A Swiss start-up is introducing a gravity-based battery solution. It is an extraordinary energy storage facility that has recently been completed in the Rudong district of Shanghai, China.

A storage system, such as a Li-ion battery, can help maintain balance of variable wind power output within system constraints, delivering firm power that is easy to integrate with other generators or the grid. The size and use of storage depend on the intended application and the configuration of the wind devices.

Solar and wind facilities use the energy stored in batteries to reduce power fluctuations and increase reliability to deliver on-demand power. Battery storage systems bank excess energy when demand is low and release it when demand is high, to ensure a steady supply of energy to millions of homes and businesses.

The batteries can be integrated with each wind turbine or installed at the wind farm level, as shown in Figure 1. The techno-economic sizing of wind-storage systems depends largely on cost models of storage and wind-hybrid systems. Such sizing tools go beyond conventional decision -making based on levelized cost of energy-based decision-making.

The model may include objective functions, such as optimizing revenue from co-optimized markets, not just from energy, which is a departure from how energy storage and distributed wind turbines have been traditionally modeled and dispatched. A wind-storage hybrid system mitigates variability by injecting more firm generation into the grid.

Co-locating energy storage with a wind power plant allows the uncertain, time-varying electric power output from wind turbines to be smoothed out, enabling reliable, dispatchable energy for local loads to the local microgrid or the larger grid.