Coordination of Regulated and Merchant Energy Storage Investments

Distributed transmission-scale energy storage is becoming economically feasible due to the growing share of renewable generation and cost reduction of specific storage technologies, primarily batteries. Under these circumstances, independent merchants may start investing in storage facilities. On the other hand, system operators, besides investing in transmission lines, may, under certain conditions, invest in storage units as well. This paper formulates a trilevel model where the upper-level problem optimizes the system operator's transmission line and energy storage investments, the middle-level problem determines merchant energy storage investment decisions, while the lower level problem simulates market clearing process for representative days. After replacing the lower level problem with its primal dual equivalent conditions, the middle- and lower level problems are merged into a mixed-integer problem with equilibrium constraints. The resulting bilevel structure is iteratively solved using a cutting plane algorithm. The proposed formulation is first applied to a six-bus system to present the mechanics of the model and then to the IEEE RTS-96 test system. The results show that even at the low cost of energy storage, the system operator (SO) still prefers line investments, while merchant investments are driven by the volatility of LMPs. Both the SO and merchant investments increase the social welfare, although this increase is mostly driven by the SO investments.