(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-03)
Vejdan, Sadegh; Grijalva, Santiago
The objective of this project is to assess the economic benefits and system impacts for grid-scale energy storage in the Southeast region for informed investment decision-making and policy analysis. Energy storage is a dynamic field exhibiting considerable near term growth. Energy storage systems (ESS) can provide a wide range of services and benefits to the sector’s entire value chain and, are therefore becoming an attractive technology among stakeholders. The present study can prove to be of service to utilities, policy- makers, researchers and other stakeholders. Several novel optimization methodologies have been developed that can be used to evaluate the relative economic merits of ESS under a range of scenarios, input conditions, and performance parameters. The methods and approaches can be extended to include additional
parameters, such as CO2 costs, CO2 emission, and welfare effects. Finally, the project provides detailed insights into the comparative economic benefits of major ESS use cases from the
perspective of residential customers, large commercial customers, and utilities. The results suggest there are significant opportunities and net economic benefits from ESS systems, whether owned and operated by large customers or utilities, or jointly-operated by both. Taken together the methodologies and findings can contribute to informed investment decision-making and policy analysis in the Southeast region, and beyond.