Optimum allocation of battery energy storage systems for power grid enhanced with solar energy

Penetrations of renewable energy sources, particularly solar energy, are increasing globally to reduce carbon emissions. Due to the intermittency of solar power, battery energy storage systems (BESSs) emerge as an important component of solar-integrated power systems due to its ability to store surplus solar power to be used at later times to avoid wastage and increase utilities profit. Conventionally, BESSs are by default placed on busses where solar farms are located, so that surplus solar power can be stored immediately without undergoing delivery over transmission lines and therefore avoid line losses. By extension, this placement method considers that each of the deployed BESS is dedicated to only the local solar farms. In other words, BESSs are deployed without considering network topology and cooperation among BESSs by pooling all their capacities to store surplus solar power is limited. Therefore, this paper proposes a method that optimally deployed BESSs and determined their capacity in a two-part framework to minimize solar energy curtailment, by considering network topology and power flow constraints. Results demonstrate that our proposed method is more efficient than the conventional deployment strategy in that it manages to store more surplus solar power.