Optimal Planning of Cloud Energy Storage System Serving Multiple High Proportion Renewable Energy Microgrids

The global decarbonization process has promoted the continuous development of renewable energy in power system. This trend also puts forward high requirements for the operational flexibility of microgrids. Although energy storage system (ESS) provides an efficient solution to this problem, the wide application of ESS is still hindered by its expensive cost. To address this problem, the concept of cloud energy storage (CES) is proposed with the inspiration of the sharing economy. CES can effectively reduce the cost of ESS and provides a promising business model for the utilization of ESS in microgrids. This paper presents an optimal planning method of CES for high proportion renewable energy microgrids. Firstly, the concept and framework of CES for high proportion renewable energy microgrids are introduced. Then, the optimal energy storage planning model of CES is built to minimize the investment and operation costs of microgrids, considering CES services for distributed renewable energy consumption and peak-valley electricity arbitrage. The model is solved by a two-layered algorithm adapting advanced particle swarm algorithm and Gurobi. Case studies are carried out based on the a CES system serving multiple microgrids. The results verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, and indicate that CES can reduce ESS application cost through economy of scale and resources sharing.