Massive Integration of Wind Power at Distribution Level Supported by Battery Energy Storage Systems

Integration of renewable generation in distribution systems aims to reduce consumption of energy from conventional sources such as coal and oil in order to minimize the negative impacts of the human ecological footprint. Massive incorporation of renewables can produce reverse power flow at distribution substations, which is against the operating philosophy and design of energy systems. To deal with this problem, the installation of a battery energy storage system (BESS) is proposed in this work. Incorporation of BESS at distribution substations can manage the excess of renewable power generation flowing in reverse, adding flexibility to the power system and allowing increased distributed generation capacity to be installed. Optimal sizing of vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) is carried out by using golden section search algorithm considering capital costs as well as operating and maintenance costs over the project lifetime. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is evaluated through the analysis of a case study. A significant reduction of both reverse flow and the power to be supplied by the substation has been observed.