Critical comparison of energy management algorithms for lithium-ion batteries in renewable power plants

Lithium-ion batteries are gaining importance for a variety of applications due to their price decrease and characteristics improvement. A good energy management strategy is required in order to increase the profitability of an energy system using a Li-ion battery for storage. The vast number of management algorithms that has been proposed to optimize the achieved profit, with diverse computational power requirements and using models with different complexity, raise doubts about the suitability of an algorithm and the required computation power for a particular application. The performance of three energy management algorithms based on linear, quadratic, and dynamic programming are compared in this work. A realistic scenario of a medium-sized PV plant with a constraint of peak shaving is used for this comparison. The results achieved by the three algorithms are compared and the grounds of the differences are analyzed. Among the three compared algorithms, the quadratic one seems to be the most suitable for renewable energy applications, given the undue simplification of the battery aging required by the linear algorithm and the discretization and computational power required by a dynamic algorithm.