Effect of Time Resolution on Capacity Expansion Modeling to Quantify Value of Long-Duration Energy Storage

Abstract

Long-duration energy storage (LDES) technologies have been recently included in capacity expansion models for long-term planning. Many of these models have a simplified temporal resolution to reduce the computation time to achieve faster scenario results. However, it is unclear if these simplifications change the optimal solution for LDES, especially when modeling grids dominated by variable renewable energy (VRE) generation. For this reason, we studied how such temporal simplification changes the modeled optimal power and energy capacity of LDES technologies. We formulated a capacity expansion problem for the California region using three different temporal resolutions. We obtained that decreasing the model complexity by using fewer time points yielded different configurations and utilization of LDES technologies.