A Fast Calculation Method Supporting Price Arbitrage for Energy Storage

As one kind of energy storage (ES) applications, ES can respond to electricity prices and help electricity users obtain economic benefits. In detail, by storing electricity during low price period and releasing power energy during high price period, ES can obtain price arbitrage or lower the energy cost for power consumers. However, among the existing ES arbitrage methods, most of them should build sophisticated modeling considering the power prices and several other ES constraints, including battery charge and discharge constraints, State-of-charge (SOC) constraints, state changes constraints, etc. The calculation is comparatively complicated and needs to be solved rely on some intelligent algorithms or professional computing tools. In this work, a fast calculation method supporting arbitrage under Time-of-Use (TOU) price for ES is proposed. The electricity price signal and ES operation factors are comprehensively considered, with a heuristic and adaptive principle suitable for ES response under electricity prices proposed. A simulation case towards an ES station considering a regional power grid is performed, presenting the proposed approach can help ES determine the optimal charging/discharging scheduling options. The calculation method needs very few computational efforts and is easy to be implemented, thus offering an effective means for ES to obtain price arbitrage.