Optimal Capacity Pricing and Sizing Approach of Cloud Energy Storage: A Bi-level Model

Cloud energy storage (CES), as an innovative energy storage sharing business model, is a large-scale energy storage sharing pool that provides storage renting service to distributed consumers. In CES, distributed consumers rent virtual storage by capacity from CES and use them as actual storage. In the meanwhile, CES operator installs centralized storage and operates them centrally according to all consumers' storage demand. In this paper, from the perspective of the CES operator, we propose a bi-level model for optimal energy storage capacity pricing and sizing. In the upper-level, the CES operator makes capacity pricing and sizing decisions. The lower-level simulates the renting and operating decisions of consumers. A case study on 100 Irish residential consumers is carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.