Cost-benefit study of dispersed battery storage to increase penetration of photovoltaic systems on distribution feeders

In this paper, a novel cost-benefit analysis method is proposed for dispersed battery energy storage system (BESS) when BESS is applied on distribution feeders with photovoltaic (PV) systems. The main objective of this method is to compare benefits and cost of the dispersed BESS that achieves overvoltage reduction and peak load shaving functions. Under high penetration level of PV, in order to assess the BESS effect of overvoltage reduction, the proposed cost-benefit analysis takes work stress of voltage regulation devices as reference. The factors of load shifting, peaking power generation, as well as individual BESS cost with its lifetime estimation are considered in the cost-benefit calculation. In particular, lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) battery and lead-acid battery are selected to demonstrate the proposed method on the modified GE distribution feeders. By comparing the cost-benefit results of these two types of battery, the lower cost battery category can be settled, and the cost-benefit sizes for each bus can be determined.