Storage optimum placement in distribution system including renewable energy resources

The inclusion of bulk Electric Energy Storages (EES) in distribution system offers a number of benefits to utilities to improve reliability and efficiency of the network. However high investment costs of EES installation should be justified for the utilities. Benefits such as system upgrade postponement and cost of energy purchased reduction in the network as well as reliability and efficiency improvement have made utilities persuaded to afford storage investment and maintenance costs. In this regard, optimal sizing and siting of storages has become the focus of the recent researches to provide a tradeoff between investment costs and expected benefits from storages. In this context, this paper proposes a strategy to optimize the size of EESs in the network while minimizing the cost of purchased energy and investment/maintenance cost of the storage. A case study is presented to evaluate this approach and examine the results.