The Use of Lithium-ion batteries as energy storage to smoothing of wind power

connected on electrical grid

Gustavo Luna1, Pedro Rosas1, Luiz A. de Medeiros1

Paola Furlanetto2, Felipe Ramos2
Flavia Garrett3, Flavia Gonçalves3, Sidney Richards3, Renato Batista3
Wendell Teixeira4, Renato Povia Silva4 ,Chen Xinjian5 ,Ding Hongwu5, Ji Tuo5

1
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco – UFPE
Av. Prof. Moraes Rego, 1235, Recife – PE, CEP 50670-901
2
Instituto de Tecnologia Edson Mororó Moura – ITEMM
Rua José Vieira de Souza, 275, Belo Jardim – PE, CEP 55150-550
3
Centro Universitário Estácio do Recife
Av. Gen. San Martin, 1449, Bongi, Recife, PE, CEP 50751-000
4
CPFL Energia
Rod. Eng. Miguel Noel, 1755, Campinas – SP, CEP 13088-900
5
State Grid International Development Co. Ltd
No.8 Xuanwumennei Street,Xicheng District,Beijing, China, 100031

Gustavo Luna <gustavo.filho@estacio.br>, Pedro Rosas<pedro.a.rosas@gmail.com>, Luiz A. de

Medeiros< lhamedeiros@gmail.com>, Paola Furlanetto<paola.furlanetto@itemm.org.br>, Felipe
Ramos<felipe.ramos@itemm.org.br> , Flavia Garrett<bioeng.garrett@gmail.com>,
Flavia Gonçalves <flavia.domingues@estacio.br>, Sidney Richards<sidney1413@gmail.com>, Renato
Batista<batistasilva.renato@gmail.com>
Wendell Teixeira<wendell@cpfl.com.br>, Renato Povia Silva< renatopovia@cpfl.com.br>, Ji Tuo
<jituo@cpfl.com.br>

Abstract
With increasing environmental concern, wind generation comes increasing your participation in the energy
matrix, which, consequently, decreases the ability to adjust the grid to it connected, whether in
transmission or distribution of energy, increasing with that, the concern about this interconnection of wind
power system, because, due to the Intermittency of wind, which follows a pattern, stochastic problems
such as the variation of frequency, power and voltage are intensified.

It is important to note that depending on the number and geographic layout of wind turbines, the power
delivered to the grid (power output) can be naturally smoothed due to cancellation of power peaks. That is,
the more wind turbines are connected in a single point, the lower the power output.

Aiming at the improvement of wind electrical grid connection, one option is the use of systems of energy
storage in lithium-ion batteries – BESS (Battery Energy Storage System), as it has a shorter response
time to meet demand power, charging or discharging as the system request. The BESS is formed by
chemical batteries connected through converters and control systems.

To simulate the operation of a BESS applied to power smoothing, proposed a system of control by using
the computational tool MATLAB ®, in which BESS is configured to try to suply the difference between the
generated and provided power. This prediction considers a neural network which provides the wind power
generated in the next step, and the value of the battery charge State - SOC, causing the battery charging,
discharging or maintain the same State of charge.

As the prediction is performed every hour, if there is no battery limits extrapolation, smoothing of power
follows in the form of steps, avoiding peaks in transmission/distribution network.

This simulation has as response not only wind power smoothed, but also behaviour analysis of battery
such as SOC, injected or absorbed power by the battery, its energy processed and its lifetime. As the
technology of batteries used is lithium-ion, its response time is not considered because this type of battery
operates with high amount of charge and discharge cycles in short intervals of time.

Other two tools were developed to assist the analysis of the results of power smoothing. The first is an
absolute variation cumulative distribution of wind power in relation to the hourly average of the analyzed
system, what allows to relate the nominal battery power with the power variation percentage of the system
supplied. The second tool this is a histogram of power delivered to electrical grid with and without the
BESS, indicating an analysis that refers to the efficiency of smoothing.

Finally, a case study is presented to illustrate the results obtained in a set of wind turbines, which is
simulated together with a BESS nominal power of 2MW and maximum battery energy 2MWh and limited
SOC between 5% and 95%, avoiding, as soon as, the battery is fully charged/discharged.

1 INTRODUCTION

The use of renewable energy, notably the wind power, has remarkable increased to supply
electricity due to several reasons, among then the environmental concern and greenhouse effect [1].

Although the wind energy is clean and renewable, its massive use can result in several problems to
operate the electrical power system. Problems such as power fluctuation can lead to voltage variations
and frequency oscillations, those effects have already been reported in [2]. The main reason related to all
problems from the wind turbines into the power system comes from the intermittency and variability from
the wind that in specific condition can jeopardize the electricity supply and even other problems such as
power system instability [2-3].

The resulting power to supply electricity comes from other dispatchable power stations, as hydro
and natural gas in the Region (Northeast) [4]. As the wind power participation increases in the local
electricity matrix, other energy sources reduce its shares, that leads to reduction on frequency and voltage
regulation. That turns out on worsening the impacts from integrating the wind power in this region [5-6],
and if the solar projects in the region are also taken into account, the intermittency in the same region can
become a serious concern to the power system operator. As expected, the more diverse is the electricity
mix of sources more the system can accommodate the fluctuations from wind (and solar) power [7], but in
this particular case, that is not going to be the real condition.

Considering the expected plans to install more and more wind farms in the region and the solar
power plants projected this paper presents an approach to use BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems)
to reduce the power fluctuation from the wind farms. As other functions the BESS will be able to to
regulate voltage and frequency, as well as to reduce the impacts of ramping from renewable sources.

This project is financed by CPFL Energia under an ANEEL (National Electrical Energy Agency) R&D
program, particularly a special call for proposals focusing on storage applied to power system – call 21.
The authors acknowledge all support from CPFL group.

2 THE PROBLEM

In this paper, the main point presented relates to the BESS sizing and uses for reduction of power
fluctuation, an operation known as power smoothing. Before presenting the operation of the BESS and its
size, here it is presented a short description of the main problem: “The Wind” behaviour.

The wind power fluctuates due to the wind variation acting on each wind turbine in the wind farm.
The wind has a spatial and time behaviour that in the wind farm leads to power cancelation (of peaks).
Large wind farms with large number of wind turbines present smaller normalised power variation output
when compared to wind farms with smaller number of wind turbines [8]. This is a consequence of the
spatial smoothing and power peak cancelation caused by the turbulence acting in each wind turbine rotor.
An example of this peak cancelation is presented in Figure 1.
 Figure 1 – Synchronised power output from: one circuit (05 wind turbines), a wind farm with 12 wind
turbines and a wind farm complex with 36 wind turbines.

From Figure 1, the power output is normalised and synchronized so it is possible to identify the size
of the power fluctuation. The normalization is done by the nominal power per group, i.e. the nominal power
of each wind turbine multiplied by the number of wind turbines. All wind turbines are installed in the same
region and they belong to the same windfarm complex in the northeast region. In the Figure 1, it is
possible to identify that the single circuit with 5 wind turbines presents the larger wind power variation
compared to the other graphics.

As the main objective of this paper is to mitigate power fluctuations from wind power plants
integration into the power system there is the energy storage systems (ESS), among them, the Battery
Energy Storage Systems (BESS).

The BESS is composed of battery, Power Conversion Systems (PCS) and Energy Management
System (EMS) [9]. The battery as expected is responsible for energy storage in electrochemical system.
The PCS is responsible to conditioning the electrical power from the AC grid and the DC Battery system, it
is also responsible for charging the batteries. Finally, the EMS is composed by monitoring system and the
entire control system, where it is also included a battery monitoring system (BMS) and all safety measures
and counter measures to guarantee the safe operation.
 This paper discusses and presents an application of BESS to smooth the power fluctuations from
windfarms. Real power measured from a windfarm is used and the simulation results are presented.

3 METHODOLOGY

The first stage of this project is to define the BESS technology and size. To define the size of the
battery a methodology of duration curve was used. The electrical power output from the wind farm
complex, classified synchronized power from each circuit (5-8 Wind turbines) was processed and the
resulting curve used to define the size that does matter It was defined the size that could represent a
mensurable impact using the battery.

In this first step, the battery is considered ideal and the time response is neglectable. At this stage,
this approximation is valid once Lithium ion is the technology adopted to the battery.

As the budget also does not allow infinite battery size, it has been opted for a battery bank with
2MW/2MWh following the expected target prices from the market. As one of the objectives of the project is
to identify the impacts on different wind farm sizes, so a large wind farm with possible configurations were
also chosen to be used as study case, see next topic.

As explained before, the size of the BESS related to the wind power fluctuations is done (also) on
the statistical base. To that purpose, the power fluctuation is computed in each hour using the data
available from the wind farm. The resulting duration curve of the power fluctuation is then computed and
the effectives of the BESS is computed in terms of the % of cases below such a value of power decided to
the BESS. In Figure 2, it is presented the duration curve of the power fluctuation and the value of 2MW
battery showed.
 Figure 2 – Duration curve of the power fluctuation in hourly base to one circuit in the wind farm.

So a BESS with 2 MW, would reduce 98% of the fluctuations from this circuit that turns out as a
good smoothing operation. The same curve shall be applied to a combination of circuits and for the entire
wind farm complex. In this case, the 2MW BESS will reduce 65% of the power fluctuation from the entire
wind farm complex (rated power 105,6 MW).

Table 1 presents the basic specifications of the BESS and Table 2 presents the operational limits
considering the State Of Charge (SOC).

Table 1 – BESS basic specification.

Battery Value

Rated Power 2 MW

Maximum power discharging 2 MW

Maximum power charging 2 MW

Rated Energy BESS 2 MWh

Table 2 – Basic information on BESS limits.

SOC %

SOC initial 50
Minimal SOC 20
Maximum SOC 95
 One first result from this project is the definition of a BESS size. As it can be seen, the 2MW has an
impact on a large wind farm because of the power fluctuation cancelation due to the spatial distribution of
the wind turbines.

3.1 Simulation Tool Wind Power Smoothing

To evaluate the operation of the BESS with the wind farm some simulation tools were developed
and implemented in Matlab®. These tools have the function of helping define the size, SOC, cycles of
operation and life of the BESS.

One of the most relevant simulation tool is the one responsible for simulating the operation of the
battery providing or draining power to/from the power system as the wind farm demands. The core of the
simulation tool uses a neural network to predict the wind power in the next time step, so the control
system can define the power from the BESS to reduce the power fluctuation. In this case, the definition of
the fluctuation is done by comparing the actual power production with the next power to be produced (a
signal sent by the Neural Network).

Another point of interest lies in the operation of the battery near the maximum and minimum state of
charge. When the SOC reaches 100% the battery loses its ability to reduce the power fluctuation by
absorbing power from the electrical grid. On the other hand, when the battery reaches the minimum SOC,
it also loses the ability to reduce the power variations by injecting power on electrical grid. Considering
these two conditions, it is defined a list of rules to avoid the battery to operate above some levels.

The SOC is computed on the energy delivered by the BESS and integrated at each time step. When
the SOC reaches these levels, the rules sent the battery to only charges or only discharges so the battery
will run always in partial state of charge so to be able to reduce the power fluctuations. It is also
implemented a hysteresis rule to improve the operation.

The resulting time series of power produced is then processed to produce analytical data. The state
of charge and the number of cycles of the battery during the smoothing operation is obtained, so it is
possible to define the life of the battery under the specific operation mode. It is also important to quantify
the power fluctuation reduction after applying the BESS.

4 CASE APPLICATION

A case study is here presented to show the application of the BESS in reducing the power
fluctuations. To this case study, a wind farm complex in the Northeast of Brazil were chosen. The complex
is composed of four wind farms using two different technologies. One uses DFIG wind turbine that amount
up to 75,6 MW while another is Synchronous Generator with full converter that sums up 30 MW, the total
rated power of the complex is 105,6 MW.

The DFIG wind turbine generator has individual rated power of 2.1 MW, leading to 36 wind turbines
installed in three wind farms. The synchronous generators, has individual power rated on 2 MW, resulting
in 15 wind turbines installed to one wind farm. All four wind farms are connected to the same 34.5 kV bus
bar and two transformers elevates the voltage to 138 kV. They share the same Point of Common Coupling
(PCC) in high voltage 138 kV and the connection is done by a single line with approximately 10 km to the
main regional substation Joao Câmara III (JCT).

Figure 2 presents the power produced in one circuit composed of 5 wind turbines DFIG totalizing
10.5 MW of nominal power.

Figura 2 - Potência instantânea gerada pelo circuito analisado.

It is possible to identify the power variation. The wind power used actually is the averaged power
computed with the energy in each 5 minutes time, the same data that is sent to the Electrical Energy
Trading Company (CCEE – the Brazilian chamber of electrical energy). The main idea of this project is to
install a BESS to this wind farm and to test the impact of it.
 The simulation result from the operation of the BESS to this circuit, just a portion of the entire wind
farm complex, is presented in Figure 4.

Figure 4 – Simulation of Power after and before the BESS operation. In Red the BESS operates and in Blue is
the original data.

The results from the operation of the BESS and its impacts on reducing the power fluctuation is very
effective. In the Figure 4 it is also shown a zoom of the power net power delivered by this circuit showing
the effective reduction in the power fluctuation.

5 CONCLUSION

Although the battery was considered ideal, the simulations from applying the method to smoothing
the power output show satisfactory results. Most of the power peaks were reduced and most of the
instantaneous power fluctuation were also converted into steeps of power production, with lower
variations. Another point is that the imposed limits on the battery operation were respected during the
simulation, where the SOC stayed between 20 and 80%.

The tools and the analysis from the results corroborate the application of BESS to reduce power
variations on wind farms. It is also important to state that the results can lead to reduced impacts on
voltage quality from wind energy. In the sequence of the project, the idea is to apply the BESS to the
entire wind farm, and then to the complex, evaluating the impacts on different wind farm sizes.
 Finally, the author wish to thanks CPFL. This project is a R&D project financed by CPFL Energia
under ANEEL special call on Battery applied to power systems, Chamada 21.

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