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BY SPE ELECTRICAL LTD

UNDERSTANDING BATTERY
ENERGY STORAGE SYSTEMS FEATURED
MANUFACTURER
(BESS) AND POWER
ARBITRAGE BY SPE
ELECTRICAL LTD
PUBLISHED 15 JUN 2021

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BATTERY ENERGY STORAGE GET QUOTE

SYSTEMS – POWER ARBITRAGE
PART 1: INTRODUCTION
Battery Energy Storage Schemes are very versatile plants and
can be used for a number of different services, depending on
the plant design and aims; this can include services such as
power arbitrage, voltage control, and the new Dynamic
Containment (DC) service which replaces the old Enhanced
Frequency Response (EFR) service. BESS units can also be
used as a power balancing service, to meet shortfalls in
power, to limit disturbances from the grid during transient
switching events, where a plant has large dynamics loads,
such as big motors and generators that switch in and out
frequently.

At SPE we have found that many developers are keen to add

battery storage systems into their existing projects, but are
often unsure exactly how the battery will be used. This leads
to the dilemma of trying to design a system that will be
flexible enough to allow future revenue streams, without pre-
investing for expensive system upgrades.

This first post gives a simple guide to explain the basic ideas
of how a BESS works and looks at their role in providing
power arbitrage.

PART 2: BESS BASICS  

Before we get into the specifics, it is worth covering a couple
 how
of basic ideas of what a BESS is and  it operates.
  First  off,  MENU 
the term BESS is generic name for an electronic Power
Conversion System (PCS) i.e. inverter, coupled with some form
of battery.CALL
FromUSthe DNO and TSO perspective the battery
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doesn’t actually matter too much, and it is the PCS that is
really of interest.

The battery can be anything from old car batteries, to modern

li-Ion batteries, or more advanced cryo-batteries or flow
batteries.

The battery type just determines how much energy can be

stored and how quickly it can be converted from chemical
form to electrical energy.

Second, a simple concept that is often misunderstood is the

difference between power (MW) and energy (MWh). A BESS
rated at 1MW & 1MWh can provide 1MW for an hour, of
0.5MW for 2 hours, or 0.25MW for 4 hours etc. but it can
never provide more than 1MW, because this limit is imposed
by the inverter rating and system design. From the DNO
perspective the amount of MW is important, as this governs
the main power flows in their network.

This leads to our third point, which is that of power swings.

Simple MW flow is easy to understand from DNOs heat maps,
but the ability of the DNO network to cope with large power
swings is much less clear and usually needs some analysis.

For power swing, we are referring to the speed at which the

BESS needs to change from import to export and vice versa.
For power arbitrage this is very slow and doesn’t cause a
significant power swing, but for fast response services like DC,
the power swing can be significant with a 50MW BESS,
potentially going from full export to full import in 1s, giving a
100MW/s power swing – which would challenge the most
robust of power systems. This is why the G99 forms ask for
the ramp rate of the BESS. This is bit of a tricky area, and
often a major constraint, which we will go through in another
post.
Our third point is that a BESS can provide reactive power as
 importantly
well as providing active power, and   it  
can provide  MENU 
reactive power at the same time, which is useful for regulating
voltage on the DNO network. Provided the BESS is correctly
sized, it could
CALLeasily
US provide 20MW of activeGETpower
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20MVAr of reactive power.

So, when preparing a grid application for a BESS it is

important to understand what services we are hoping to
provide to the system and what the local limitations are.

The DNO or National Grid, typically want to know the MW

capacity of the site, and the worst-case power swing as well as
any reactive power flow capability, as these are what will
affect their system behaviour and responses, but are not
usually that interested in the MWh rating of the system.

PART 3: POWER ARBITRAGE

The power arbitrage service of a BESS is technically and
commercially the simplest concept for battery storage. It is
based on the simple premise of absorbing energy when it
power is cheap, such as at night or when there is excess
power from CHP or solar array, and then discharging the
battery during peak load times. The benefit of such an
approach allows what is known as load demand curve
shifting, where the excess power from renewables (often
solar) is stored at high production times / low demand then
discharged at low production times / peak demand.

This has two main benefits. Firstly, and depending on the

profile, high tariff electricity costs can be avoided, and a flat
charging profile created. Secondly, it means that the size of
the grid connection can potentially be reduced, although one
needs to consider what happens if there was a shortfall in the
surplus power i.e. a very cloud day, if the surplus comes from
a Solar PV array.

The revenue streams here are obviously limited to the cost of

energy creation and storage at cheap times, compared to the
cost of energy during high tariff times, and is based on the
concept of peak shifting the energy demand, so that it is
balanced more evenly across a 24 hour(or whatever
  other    MENU 
timeframe). In the authors opinion, this is the ‘holy grail’ of
most BESS units and The System Operators (TSO), an
electrical system demand that is predictable,
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easy to plant and dispatch. In practice to achieve, this the
BESS has to be cheap and robust enough to store and
dispatch energy as needed, and when is most economic to do
so.

Figure 1: Diagram Showing Power Arbitrage Concept

With power arbitrage, the charge and discharge of the BESS is

usually very slow, and this will not overly stress the host
electrical system or the DNO system. From a design point of
view, compliance with the ENA P28/2 standard is not usually
an issue, but a large battery systems can contribute
significantly to the system harmonics and voltage flicker due
to the power electronics operation, which usually needs some
careful analysis to ensure compliance.

A less obvious use of a BESS is using it as a power store to

support starting and operation of a heavy consumer of
power. Let us say for example you have a heavy industrial
plant that you want to add a new 10MW motor to. Starting
these motors is always a complex process, but fortunately
ones that a Variable Speed Drive solves easily, but what
happens if your grid supply to the DNO is maxed out and an
upgrade will cost millions. Simple(ish), you install a BESS and
charge it up overnight, then discharge it when the new drive
needs to operate. The DNO does not see any additional
  are needed.
power demand and no network upgrades     MENU 
PART 4: APPLICATIONS – POWER ARBITRAGE &
BALANCING
CALL IN
US A WATER TREATMENT WORKS
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(WTW)
For an application example, let us consider an example of a
Water Treatment Works (WTW) that is hoping to achieve
carbon neutral status within the next 5 years. WTW sites are
interesting ones to study, as they tend to have a mix of large
varying loads such as pumps and compressors, and plenty of
space to install Solar PV and a BESS and carry out the tie-ins
between the new and existing plant. It should be noted that
for our analysis, the site type doesn’t really matter as the
principles are the same.

So how does power arbitrage work with a battery storage

system work? This is best understood with an example. First,
we start with the basic premise, that the plant owner has
assessed their DNO connection and there are no problem and
second that site has enough space to install a fair sized Solar
PV array of 5-10 MW. Next, we look at the site power
consumption, this is usually very dynamic, but lets pretend for
a moment, that we can simplify things a bit and say they have
an average steady state consumption during the day of 2MW,
and at night-time it drops to 0.5MW.  Our basic specification
might look something like this:

Space to install 5-10MW Solar PV array.

Available HV point for tie-in.
Desire to achieve full carbon neutral operation.
Site load profile is simplified to a consistent value of:
2 MW approximately constant load between 8am and
7pm (11 hours) = 22MWh
5MW constant load between 7pm and 8 am (13 hours) =
6.5MWh

Simple deployment of a solar PV scheme would certainly help

the asset owner, as the power produced by the Solar PV
would offset the power consumption of the WTW by a
significant margin. However, the problem would be that either
the Solar PV would be oversized   peak
and during    
daylight  MENU 
hours would be exporting power, or it would be undersized,
and not fully offset the power demand, and in both cases the
night-timeCALL
powerUSdemand would still be needed.  This
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presents a dilemma for the asset owner, as neither scheme
meets the objectives, but by adding a BESS into the mix, we
can possible meet all the target goals.

Next, let’s do bit of basic maths to see what works, to

calculate average any usage, energy storage capacity and so
on. This can be done in a number of ways, depending on the
level of sophistication desired, at the most basic, a simple
Excel and graphical model can be generated of the load and
generation profiles, but it is relatively easy to create more
advanced mathematical models of the system, using various
integration methods and piecewise linear functions, or
directly in simulation package like Matlab. For the purpose of
this post we will go for an easy Excel approach.

In the below diagram we can see a simplified power

generation diagram shown in block format for the power
generation (green), power demand (red), excess PV
discharged into the BESS (blue) and power discharged from
the BESS (yellow).
Figure 2: Simplified Block Diagram Showing Power Arbitrage
Calculation        MENU 
From the above plots we can see that we get a pretty good
power balance, with around 2MWh spare capacity from the
Solar PV system, which we can account forGET
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intermittency, CONTACT
shading and other losses. We do can do some more simple
maths and we can roughly dimension our PCS and battery
size, as follows:

The solar PV is sized to give a peak output of 5MWac.

The battery PCS size has to be equal to the largest
difference between the plant demand and the solar
output. This occurs in the evening when power demand is
still high and the solar output has fallen to near zero . I.e so
the delta is 1 MW.
We can see from the above that we need the BESS to be
able to deliver 10.5 MWh.
Our final design is therefore a 5 MW PV array coupled with
a 1 MW BESS with a 10.5 MWh energy store.

PART 5: SUMMARY – POWER ARBITRAGE

The above is obviously very simple analysis, representing a
simple Solar PV curve, and not accounting for probability and
differing irradiance levels during the day and seasons.
Likewise, the load is likely to significantly more variable than
the simplified model shown. The thing to remember here, is
that the post just shows a simple model for demonstration
purposes, to show a principle of how a system could be made
to work.

In practice, it is usually not economic to design a Solar PV and

BESS system that achieves full carbon offset, because of the
inherent probabilistic values in the irradiance levels. However,
with some careful analysis and a bit of time, a Solar PV and
BESS can go along way to meeting this target. The above
example is for a WTW but would work just as well, for a large
factory, or country estate. Of course, adding in a BESS to a
brownfield site is never quite that simple, so it is usually
necessary to carry out some surveys, and identify if the
equipment is suitably rated for the increased duty and then
     
identify the necessary tie in location.  MENU 
It should also of course be noted that we have considered
Solar PV and a battery storage solution here, but the principle
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applies to any intermittent renewable, such as wind power or
wave power and any other storage technology, such as hydro,
compressed air / gas etc. One final thing we can do with the
new system, is to run the Solar and BESS at a slightly lagging
power factor (producing MVArs) so the site is held at unity PF
and even greater savings are achieved.  If you would like to
discuss your project requirements, please get in touch.

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