Market integration of renewables and multi-service storage applications

As supporting mechanisms for wind and solar electricity generation reduce, it is important to understand how the market is integrating this renewable generation, and what technical solutions may aid the transition to market only revenues. After the analysis of the current barriers and opportunities of wind and solar power generation in the electricity markets, this paper focuses on the integration of solar power generation. Through the design and analysis of a case study with real production and market data, the work addresses the question of how better forecasting decreases the investment payback period of these producers, as well as the benefits of resorting to multi-service energy storage applications. The paper introduces a novel approach for multi-service energy storage sizing for applications in solar power plants that exploits the daily cycle of solar power production to explicitly model the provision of secondary and tertiary reserves during the night. The results show a clear benefit of deploying multi-service energy storage applications, namely from partaking in the provision of secondary and tertiary regulation reserves.