Long-Term Revenue Estimation for Battery Performing Arbitrage and Ancillary Services

Abstract

Energy storage revenue estimation is essential for analyzing financial feasibility of investment in batteries. We quantify the cycles of operation considering depth-of-discharge (DoD) of operational cycles and provide an algorithm to calculate equivalent 100% DoD cycles. This facilitates in comparing cycles of different DoDs. The battery life is frequently defined as a combination of cycle and calendar life. We propose a battery capacity degradation model based on the cycle and the calendar life and operational cycles. Using equivalent 100% DoD cycles and revenue generated, we calculate the dollars per cycle revenue of storage performing electricity price based arbitrage and ancillary services for load balancing in real time. Using PJM’s (a regional transmission organization in the United States) real data we calculate short term and long term financial potential for the year of 2017. We observe that participating in ancillary services is significantly more beneficial for storage owners compared to participating in energy arbitrage.