Incorporating Operational Uncertainties into the Dispatch of an Integrated Solar and Storage System

The economic assessment of a hybrid energy system (HES) pairing battery energy storage systems (BESSs) and pho-tovoltaics is highly important to advancing their deployment for a decarbonized grid. This paper presents an innovative control and assessment framework for using the HES for bundling services, including energy charge reduction, demand charge reduction, and transmission charge reduction. To tackle the uncertainty associated with the load, on each operating day, the probability of the monthly peak load occurring on the day is generated and compared with a preset threshold to determine whether to activate the dispatch of BESS. If the dispatch of BESS is triggered, a model predictive control is then carried out to minimize the total operational cost. By exercising this policy with different thresholds, one can explore the trade-offs between short- term benefits and battery lifetime, and identify an optimal threshold that maximizes the present value benefits over the battery lifetime. To illustrate the proposed framework, we also present an evaluation study of a real-world HES project deployed at Horn Rapids in the City of Richland, Washington.