Publications

Opportunities and trends for energy storage plus solar in the CAISO real-time market: 2014-2018

Byrne, Raymond H.; Nguyen, Tu A.; Headley, Alexander; Trevizan, Rodrigo D.

Increased deployment of rooftop solar in California has resulted in the "duck curve", where there is a decrease in the midday net load followed by a very fast increase in late afternoon caused by declining solar output and a simultaneous increase in load. The large observed and even larger predicted ramp rates present a reliability concern. Therefore, there is keen interest in the potential advantages of deploying solar combined with energy storage. This paper formulates the optimization problem to identify the maximum potential revenue from pairing storage with solar and participating in the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) hour-ahead scheduling process (HASP) real-time market for energy. Using the optimization formulation, five years of historical market data (2014-2018) for 2, 172 price nodes was analyzed to identify trends and opportunities for the deployment of solar plus storage. In addition, a comparison of the opportunities in the day ahead and HASP real-time energy markets is presented.