When integrating variable renewable energy sources (photovoltaic, wind, run-of-river) into energy systems, energy storage systems (ESS) are required in order to balance their weather-driven fluctuations and uncertainty. There are many storage systems available (such as pumped hydro storage, compressed air, batteries, molten salts, hydrogen, hydro reservoirs...), but they differ significantly in terms of investment cost per power and energy capacity, lifetime, storage losses, efficiency and flexibility. Up to date, we still do not know the optimal combination of those when their multiple services are considered.
The research question is: what mix of energy storage systems has the lowest operation and investment costs, and the highest system reliability, when energy sources are highly variable and uncertain? This project will develop a framework for finding this optimal storage mix with focus on hydropower and hydrostorage solutions. It will tackle two challenges: the modelling of storage systems in stochastic optimization problems and the reduction of computational costs for solving such large systems.
The results will support decision making processes in energy policies.
| More Info | |||
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| Researcher | Jannik Haas | ||
| Principal Investigator | Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Nowak | Partner | Prof. Rodrigo Palma (Universidad de Chile, Chile) |
| Duration | 08/2015 - 07/2018 | Funding | German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) |