Practical Strategies for Storage Operation in Energy Systems: Design and Evaluation

Motivated by the increase in small-scale solar installations used for powering homes and small businesses, we consider the design of rule-based strategies for operating an energy storage device connected to a self-use solar generation system to minimize payments to the grid. This problem is inherently challenging, since strategies depend greatly on the choice of the tariff structure and forecasts of future generation and load. We propose an optimization framework for finding optimal operation strategies and use it to evaluate the performance of an existing operating strategy that we modified to not use forecasts, in the context of differential pricing. We also use our framework to propose a new practical operating strategy for peak-demand pricing. We simulate the two rule-based strategies using real data for solar generation and building load, and find that they are able to achieve near-optimal performance without requiring forecasts.