Publications

Opportunities for Energy Storage in CAISO

Byrne, Raymond H.; Nguyen, Tu A.; Concepcion, Ricky J.

Energy storage is a unique grid asset in that it is capable of providing a number of grid services. In market areas, these grid services are only as valuable as the market prices for the services provided. This paper formulates the optimization problem for maximizing energy storage revenue from arbitrage and frequency regulation in the CAISO market. The optimization algorithm was then applied to three years of historical market data (2014-2016) at 2200 nodes to quantify the locational and time-varying nature of potential revenue. The optimization assumed perfect foresight, so it provides an upper bound on the maximum expected revenue. Since California is starting to experience negative locational marginal prices (LMPs) because of increased renewable generation, the optimization includes a duty cycle constraint to handle negative LMPs. The results show that participating in frequency regulation provides approximately 3.4 times the revenue of arbitrage. In addition, arbitrage potential revenue is highly location-specific. Since there are only a handful of zones for frequency regulation, the distribution of potential revenue from frequency regulation is much tighter.