Operating Parameters and Charging/Discharging Strategies for Wind Turbine Energy Storage Due to Economic Benefits

As the installed power of wind turbines increases, new challenges for the implementation of wind energy in the national power system emerge. Several hours of high energy productivity from wind turbines, together with the periodic occurrence of relatively low energy consumption (at a national scale), sometimes result in the need to stop their operation and, much more often, result in very low revenues for electricity. One of the ways to reduce these phenomena, from a technical and economic point of view, is to use energy storage. However, managing such energy storage poses many challenges due to the unpredictably different duration of favorable and unfavorable wind conditions. Based on historical data on wind turbine energy generation and market data on electricity prices, the impact of using an energy storage with an effective capacity of 2.4 MWh (total 4 MWh) with a maximum charging and discharging power (set parameter) of 1.2 MW in cooperation with a wind turbine (capacity 3 MW) was analyzed. Using simulation methods for energy production and price data from 34,964 h (4 years), the potential additional revenue for the energy storage installed at the wind turbine was calculated. The developed model considered various values: minimum charging power, maximum charging power; and as elements of price signals: price averaging period, level of price deviation from the average electricity price.