Congestion-induced Wind Curtailment Mitigation

using Energy Storage

Mohammad Moradzadeh
1
, Brecht Zwaenepoel
1,2
, Jan Van de Vyver
1
, Lieven Vandevelde
1,2
1
Electrical Energy Laboratory, Dep. of Electrical Energy, Systems and Automation, Ghent University
Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 41, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
mohammad.moradzadeh@ugent.be
2
Energy knowledge platform Power-Link, Ghent University
8400 Oostende, Belgium
AbstractAllowing the connection of additional renewable
energy sources (RES) in areas with limited transmission capacity
is becoming of a serious concern. Building new transmission lines
only provides a long-term solution to cope with this issue due
to the fact that it takes much longer time (up to 5-10 years)
compared to time needed to build new wind farms (about 1 year).
Storage is proven to be an effective solution to make maximal
use of existing grid infrastructures in the short-term. This paper
proposes a cost-benet optimization formulation for optimally
sizing the storage in a wind-storage system which is connected
to an external spot market via limited transmission lines. A small
test system is studied in order to nd the optimal size of storage
to avoid congestion by allowing revenue to be generated only
via reducing the congestion-induced wind curtailment. Additional
revenue streams can be also included to maximize the monetary
value of the wind-storage system.
Index TermsWind curtailment, active network management,
transmission congestion, storage, optimization.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays ever-increasing environmental and economic (en-
vironmic) incentives promote distribution system operators
(DSOs) to integrate more and more renewable energy sources
(RES) to the existing power system. One example is Europes
ambitious climate and energy policy, known as the 20-20-
20 targets, that clearly reect the long-term commitment of
EU to promote green and low-carbon energy. The EU has
put forward an even longer-term roadmap for moving to a
more climate-friendly and less energy-consuming economy
in 2050. This rapid growth in the integration of RES cre-
ates substantial challenges for DSOs. Congestion is one of
these challenges which is in fact highly correlated to the
intermittent and most importantly uncontrollable nature of
the output power of most of RES (like wind and solar).
Congestion may lead to the tripping of the corresponding
lines, overloading additional equipments (like other lines or
generators), or ultimately blackouts. As one never accurately
knows when (and for how long) wind starts blowing or sun
starts shining, there might be time periods during which there
is produced too much wind/solar energy but the (maximum)
capacity of the existing transmission lines can no longer
accommodate it. In such a situation, a simple solution for
DSOs is to curtail the power injection of some wind turbines
(non-rm connections). Avoiding curtailment would otherwise
require expensive and time-consuming investments to expand
the existing transmission network which will indeed be used
only for a few hours a year (during congestion periods).
Generally speaking, congestion management is dened as a set
of actions taken in order to relieve (transmission) bottlenecks
(to guarantee the security of electricity supply), and to increase
the power transfer capabilities (to increase the reliability of
the supply of electricity) [1]. Active network management
(ANM) can provide several real-time solutions that play an
important role in achieving the main goal of congestion
management in avoiding the (transmission) bottlenecks. Even
though the wind curtailment, nowadays, turns to be a common
phenomenon to most areas with high penetration of wind
units, the development of socio-economic curtailment schemes
is still relatively new [2]. This paper only focuses on the
techno-economic use of storage, as an ANM-based solution,
in a wind-storage system which is connected to an external
spot market via limited transmission lines. A cost-benet
optimization formulation is proposed, and a test system is
studied in which storage is allowed to generate monetary
revenue only by reducing the amount of congestion-induced
wind curtailment. Other revenue streams can be additionally
considered to maximize the monetary value of the wind-
storage system.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The
concept of ANM is discussed in entire section II. Section III
describes possible revenue streams that are available for energy
storage. A generic model for energy storage is developed in
section IV. A measure to evaluate the nancial viability of
incorporating storage in the system is discussed in section
V. Section VI proposes a two-stage optimization formulation
rstly to optimally size the storage and secondly to maximize
the monetary value of the designed storage in real-time oper-
ation. The results on the test system are discussed in section
VII. Finally, conclusions are drawn in section VIII.
II. ACTIVE NETWORK MANAGEMENT (ANM)
Traditionally (under low penetration of RES), wind units
were connected to the distribution grid under a passive
network management making use of the so-called t-and-
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forget approach. The distribution grid was sized/designed at
the planning stage to accommodate foreseen combinations
of generation and demand levels. This could often lead to
oversizing of the grid when e.g. peak loads occur only a few
hours a year. In addition, t-and-forget approach provided
rm grid access to wind units up to rated capacity of the
wind generator. However, rm-access for wind units would
mean reservation of transmission capacity for the transmission
system operator (TSO), as a result, it may lead to inefcient
use of grid infrastructure. To cope with the exponential growth
in the connection of RES, there is a need for smarter real-
time operational solutions to manage the network. ANM can
be generally dened as the (optimal) real-time control of
generation and/or demand with the goal of maximal utilization
of the existing grid infrastructure. Under a congestion-induced
wind curtailment scheme, ANM can refer to a set of strategies
that may be employed in order to avoid (transmission) con-
gestion, and to minimize the wind curtailment. It can include
dynamic (real-time) line rating (DLR) [3], [4], (near) real-
time wind forecasting, real-time demand-side management
(DSM) [5], and storage. A mixture (or all) of said ANM-
based solutions can be integrated in the same control system
as countermeasures against wind curtailment [6], [7], [8], [9].
Deciding upon their techo-economic use forms an interesting
business case for the DSOs where they need to decide either
1) to curtail the excessive wind power production, or 2) to
reinforce the transmission capacity by investing on the cables,
or 3) to buy/install storage devices, or 4) to apply other ANM-
based solutions. This paper only focuses on the use of storage.
III. ENERGY STORAGE
In an ANM scheme, storage can be employed as an effective
countermeasure for transmission congestion management.
The otherwise curtailed surplus green energy can be charged
to the storage during the congested periods alleviating the
congestion-induced wind/solar curtailment, and be discharged
to a spot market when technically (transmission) network
capacity is available, and economically price-arbitrage is
favorable [6]. Note that beside many technical ancillary
services provided by storage, the monetary value of storage
to generate revenue is three-fold:
curtailment reduction: this revenue stream is only dened
for congestion periods. It consists of storing congestion-
induced otherwise curtailed wind energy from non-rm wind
units at zero cost during congestion periods, and selling it
at a later time to a spot market when congestion is relieved
and/or prices are more favorable.
generation time-shifting: this revenue stream is dened for
no-congestion periods. Here transmission capacity is available
for the wind unit to sell (the immediately generated) wind
energy to the grid but market prices are not economically
favorable to do so. Time-shifting refers to deferring the wind
power generation by storing energy generated by wind unit
at zero cost, during unfavorable market prices, and selling it
at a later time to a spot market when prices are more favorable.
price arbitrage: this revenue stream is also dened
for no-congestion periods. It is a trading capability of
storage to buy energy from an external spot market (and
not to store from wind unit at zero cost) at a certain time
and sell it back to the grid when economically more protable.
Reference [10] formulates an operational optimization prob-
lem for maximizing the revenue generated by storage through
two revenue streams: 1)price arbitrage, and 2)wind curtailment
reduction via time-shifting wind generation. The said opti-
mization algorithm is a real-time operational strategy which
iteratively schedules the optimal charging/discharging power
rates to/from storage for every 30-minutes interval of the study
horizon (1 year). Reference [11] develops a Markov decision
process to model the random evolution of wind and electricity
price for managing a wind-based electricity generation unit
in the presence of storage, taking the transmission capac-
ity into account. It follows that under a tightly-constrained
transmission scenario, the majority of the monetary revenue
increase comes from curtailment-reduction and time-shifting
generation, price-arbitrage being the minor player. However,
when transmission capacity is less-constrained the nancial ef-
fect of time-shifting and price-arbitrage are more pronounced,
curtailment-reduction being the least revenue contributer.
Figure 1 illustrates the day-ahead prices of Belgian electricity
market (Belpex) for month of April in 2013. The average price
of one day is shown along the minimum and the maximum
prices of each day over the entire month. This graph clearly
represents the strong capability of the energy storage devices
to generate nancial revenue via generation time-shifting and
price-arbitrage.
0
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r
|
c
e

(

]
M
W
h
)
Date
Max rlce
AvC rlce
Mln rlce
Fig. 1. Belpex prices for month of April in 2013
IV. GENERIC ENERGY STORAGE MODEL
Before mathematical formulation of the optimization prob-
lem, a mathematical model for energy storage system is given
in this section. The following generic discrete-time model for
energy storage can be employed to perform optimization [12]:
E
s
(k + 1) = E
s
(k) + P
s
(k).T (1)
ENERGYCON 2014 May 13-16, 2014 Dubrovnik, Croatia
978-1-4799-2449-3/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE 573
where
=
_

c
, if P
s
(k) 0 (charging)

d
=
1

c
, otherwise (discharging)
(2)
subject to
0 E
s
(k) E
max
s
(3)
|P
s
(k)| P
max
s
(4)
where k denotes the present time instant t
k
= k.T, E
s
(k)
the level of stored energy at present time k, P
s
(k) the power
exchange (charging/discharging) with the storage at time k,

c
resp.
d
charging resp. discharging efciencies. T =
t
k+1
t
k
is the duration of each interval (time difference
between two subsequent time instants e.g. k +1 and k). Note
that depending on the type of the storage technology, different
operational constraints on maximum power exchange as well
as on maximum energy capacity itself may apply. E
max
s
denotes the maximum energy capacity of the storage, and
P
max
s
is the maximum rate of charge/discharge. We assume in
this study that the (absolute value of) maximum rate of charge
P
maxc
s
and maximum rate of discharge P
maxd
s
are equal.
Thus,
|P
maxc
s
| = P
max
s
, |P
maxd
s
| = P
max
s
(5)
V. FINANCIAL VIABILITY OF A STORAGE PROJECT
Due to high capital cost of energy storage systems, and
limited lifetime of most of storage technologies and their
(rather) low efciency, an in-depth economic analysis is
needed to determine whether or not a new storage project is
nancially viable. Difculties in accurately estimating capital
cost (especially for state-of-the-art storage technologies), and
their expected lifetime (considerably effected by depth-of-
discharge (DOD)) makes this problem even more challenging.
We will use net present value (NPV) as an economic measure
for this purpuse. Note that NPV is a measure to compare the
value of money at present time with the value of the same
amount of money in the future, taking ination into account.
An investment on a prospective project is protable if its NPV
is positive, while a negative NPV means that the project should
be rejected.
NPV = C
S
+
N

n=1
R
n
(1 + r)
n
(6)
where C
s
is the initial investment cost (capital + O&M), N
is the overall lifetime of the project (storage in this case), r
is the (annual) discount/interest rate, and R
n
is the revenue
generated by storage at year/month n.
VI. FORMULATION OF THE OPTIMIZATION PROBLEM
A. Stage I: design optimization for sizing the storage
The design optimization is to determine storage maximum
energy capacity E
max
s
and maximum charge/discharge power
rate P
max
s
. On the other hand, the total investment cost
of energy storage system C
S
is very much technology-
dependent, and can signicantly vary from one to another
[13]. The latter two design parameters E
max
s
, P
max
s
will
jointly dene C
S
by imposing costs associated with P
max
s
(an indication of how big the power conversion unit is), plus
costs associated with E
max
s
(e.g. size of electrolyte storage
tank in ow battery).
C
S
= C
g
P
. P
max
s
+ C
g
E
. E
max
s
. .
initial capital cost
+ C
g
O&M
. .
O&M cost
(7)
where C
g
P
is the capital cost per each unit of power of the
storage technology g (in e/KW), and C
g
E
is the capital cost
per each unit of energy of the technology g (in e/KWh). As
mentioned before, the values of C
g
E
and C
g
P
can be very dif-
ferent for each storage technology. Note that beside one-time
capital cost certain annual operation and maintenance costs
C
g
O&M
(in e/KW-yr) also apply for each storage technology.
It is a common practice to assume the annual C
g
O&M
constant
over the lifetime of the energy storage (e.g. equal to 1% of
the capital cost per year).
We size the storage based on the following:
when congestion:
- charge only from wind unit
- discharge to the grid at market price as
soon as congestion is relieved to gener-
ate revenue
This can be mathematically expressed by the following
maximization problem:
(P
max
s

, E
max
s

) = argmax
P
max
s
,E
max
s
NPV (P
max
s
, E
max
s
) (8)
= (C
g
P
. P
max
s
+ C
g
E
. E
max
s
+ C
g
O&M
)
+ R
1

N

n=1
1
(1 + r)
n
where
R
1
= R
n
, n = 2, . . . , N
R
1
=
n
T

k=1
(k). min
_
_
E
S
(0) +
k

i=1
(i). sign(P
S
(i)).
min(|P
S
(i)|, P
max
s
).T
_
, E
max
S
_
.(k)
and
=
_
0, if P
s
0 (charging)
1, otherwise (discharging)
n
T
=
T
T
is the total number of 15-minute intervals, and
T total length of study horizon. is a binary variable which
ENERGYCON 2014 May 13-16, 2014 Dubrovnik, Croatia
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is introduced to distinguish between charging and discharging
modes. (k) refers to the external spot market price at time k.
B. Stage II: operational optimization for maximizing the rev-
enue generated by storage
After sizing the storage in Stage I, in order to obtain the
maximum revenue generated by storage, we consider another
operational optimization according to the following:
when no congestion:
- charge from both wind unit and the grid
at favorable moments
- discharge when favorable (not as soon as
congestion is relieved)
This can be mathematically expressed by the following opti-
mization problem:
P

s
= argmax
P
s
R
1
(P
s
) (9)
where
R
1
=
n
T

k=1
(k).P
S
(k).(k)
and
=
_
1, if P
s
0 (charging)
+1, otherwise (discharging)
where the optimal discharge (and also charging from the grid)
time can be decided based on the other parameters such as
market price, wind forecast, DLR, and DSM.
This optimization algorithm will iteratively -for every dis-
crete time instant- dictate the optimal schedule for charg-
ing/discharging power rates of storage.
The proposed optimization algorithm employs the histori-
cal time-series data for wind generation units, demand, and
market price, for every 15-minute interval, of the past years.
This would mean a perfect-forecast scenario for a real-time
optimization algorithm to which possible prediction errors of
those parameters apply. Thus the optimization algorithm based
on historical data will nd the absolute optimal size of the
storage, and the maximum possible revenue available during
that past year. Expectedly, the results given by a real-time
optimization algorithm may be different from those given by
an algorithm based on historical data. However, the historical-
data based algorithm provides an effective measure to evaluate
the performance of a real-time optimization algorithm by
comparing the results.
VII. TEST SYSTEM
Figure 2 shows a simple prototypical wind-storage system
which is connected to the main grid via some weak trans-
mission lines. The 5 MW wind turbine generator is located
far away from load area (in main grid), and the 15 kV
(distribution) line is subject to voltage and current congestion.
At the presence of no storage device, one would need to
simply curtail the congestion-induced wind power, let alone
reinforcing the transmission lines, in order to relieve the
congestion. Figure 3 shows the excessive power production (in
KW) of the wind turbine on an 15-minute basis that causes
voltage and/or current congestion. There are 6695 quarters
(out of 35040) with excessive production, i.e. about 19% of
the overall time (entire year 2011). The prole is averaged
around 265 KW across the entire year, and around 1385 KW
across periods with exessive power production. To relive the
congestion, the surplus of power needs either to be curtailed or
to be stored in this case. The aim of this section is to nd the
optimal size of a storage device to avoid congestion. Note that
the economic operation of the storage device is not considered
in this paper. Thus it is assumed that energy storage is only
able to generate revenue by reducing the amont of congestion-
induced wind power curtailemnt, and cannot participate in
generation time-shifting and price arbitrage. As shown in
Fig. 4, the imbalance prices for year 2011 (in e/MWh) in
Belgian electricity market is employed on an 15-minute basis
to perform the proposed optimization algorithm. As can be
seen, the price is averaged around 30 e/MWh across the entire
year, with very high peak over 2750 e/MWh in March 28 [14].
Beside pumped hydro and compressed air energy storage
technologies as mature solutions, the utility-scale Sodium-
Sulfur (Na-S) and Lead-Acid (Pb) batteries are commercially
available. We will consider Na-S battery type for the calcula-
tion, with the parameters given in Table I [15], [16], [17].
TABLE I
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CONSIDERED NA-S BATTERY
C
g
P
255 e/KW
C
g
E
255 e/KWh
C
g
O&M
10 e/KW-yr
(%) 85
N 15
The exchange rate 1US$ = 0.73 e is applied.
This economical analysis reveals that the total investment
cost of the Na-S battery considered in this paper is much
higher than the revenue that could be generated by employing
only a single revenue stream (curtailment reduction). Thus, the
algorithm conrms that it is not economically viable to size
the storage device based on only curtailment reduction. The
storage project may become protable either by reducing the
total investment cost of the storage device, or by including
other possible revenue streams to maximize the monetary
value that can be generated by storage (such as generation
time-shifting, price arbitrage, or any governmental subsidy
in terms of feed-in tariffs etc.) The NPV for a 1.5MW
10MWh Na-S battery turns out to be -e2953400 in the studied
case (note the negative sign), i.e. the difference of the total
investment cost e3157500 and the revenue that could be
generated only by curtailment reduction e204120. Assuming
that O&M cost remains the same (10 e/KW-yr), the storage
under consideration would be marginally protable if the
capital costs would be dramatically reduced down to values
ENERGYCON 2014 May 13-16, 2014 Dubrovnik, Croatia
978-1-4799-2449-3/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE 575
C
g
P
= 3.2123 e/KW and C
g
E
= 1.6062 e/KWh.
Power grid
(electricity market)
Possible directions
for power flow
Fig. 2. One-line diagram of the test system
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4
x 10
4
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
Fig. 3. Curtailed power of a wind turbine
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4
x 10
4
-500
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
Fig. 4. Imbalance prices for year 2011
VIII. CONCLUSION
This paper deals with the exploitation of storage in low
voltage (LV) wind-storage distribution grids with the aim of
alleviating the transmission congestion, and to minimize the
amount of curtailed wind. A generic model for energy storage
is derived which is suitable to be used in optimization for-
mulations. From DSO point of view a two-stage optimization
problem is formulated to optimally size the storage, and later
to maximize the revenue that can be generated by it. To
perform the optimization, a simple prototypical wind-storage
system is considered which is connected to the main grid via
some weak transmission lines. The results show that due to
high investment costs of the energy storage (a Na-S battery in
this case), it is not economically viable to size the storage only
for curtailment reduction purpose. The results also suggest
that, in the studied case, it is necessary to include other
possible revenue streams to increase the monetary value of
the wind-storage system.
The important issue of storage placement is also discussed
by introducing the concept of PTDF. The paper under consid-
eration in fact provide the foundation for another upcoming
paper which will represent the simulation/optimization results
using the real-time time-series data of wind, price and demand.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The research was carried out in the frame of the Inter-
university Attraction Poles program IAP-VII-02, funded by
the Belgian Government.
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ENERGYCON 2014 May 13-16, 2014 Dubrovnik, Croatia
978-1-4799-2449-3/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE 576