Minimal aging operating strategies for battery energy storage systems in photovoltaic applications

High capital investment cost for batteries constitute a major obstacle to the widespread deployment of battery energy storage systems (BESSs) as a tool to support the integration of renewable energy sources into the electricity grid. BESSs are already operated in commercial MW-scaled photovoltaic (PV) installations to facilitate power production levelling and participation in auxiliary services, such as frequency and voltage control. The optimization of dispatch schedules has been employed in the past to aid the sizing of BESS and drive down capital expenditures by limiting the installed battery capacity to the minimum required for the application. In this work, an optimized operation strategy is used to reduce replacement costs for the batteries by adapting the state-of-charge and power solicitation to achieve minimized aging. To this end, a simplified model for both calendar and cycle aging of Li-ion batteries is integrated into a mixed-integer linear programming algorithm. Results from a simulation using typical specifications for a BESS operated in a PV power plant in French overseas regions are presented and discussed.