Projecting battery plants at the customer side of the meter

The technical and economic factors that affect a customer's selection of a battery power plant are discussed. The main tasks of such a battery plant are load leveling, peak shaving, emergency power supply, and power factor correction. Standardized planning and exact dimensioning can affect the economy of such plants greatly. The realization of a battery plant can be divided into three phases. First, the customer's power system has to be analyzed to decide whether it could economically be equipped with a battery or not. The aim of the second phase is to find the optimal battery layout with respect to the technical and economical constraints, using computer simulations to test battery behavior under different operating and ambient conditions, including effects like aging and variation of control algorithms. The battery plant implementation is the third phase. A planning example in a German distribution utility is included.<>