Economic assessment of battery energy storage systems for reducing production deviations of wind farms

Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs) can increase the controllability of wind farms and, therefore, the incomes its operators obtain in the energy markets. More precisely, BESSs can be used to reduce the production deviations of wind farms with respect to the scheduled production and, therefore, the penalties imposed for these deviations. This paper presents a method to estimate an upper bound of the profitability that could be yielded by a battery used this way. It has been found that a rule-based operation model reflects more truthfully a realistic battery operation than an optimization-based operation model. The developed method has been run using historic production data of an actual wind farm, in order to assess the profitability of a wide range of batteries. It has been found that the investment is far from being attractive.