Capacity firming of intermittent generation by dispersed energy storage

The paper addresses the question of capacity firming of renewable energy sources as an effective tool for mitigating the volatility of their generation. The existing approaches propose an integration of these sources with some flexible production as a back-up support, flexible demand or energy storage systems at point of common coupling in order to provide some degree of firmness to the production. However, this research makes step further towards the idea to provide an adequate support with dispersed energy storage capacities at the distribution level owned by numerous prosumers (not excluding consumers and virtual power plants), where the batteries are primarily deployed for the needs of the prosumers (maximization of self-consumption) and the remaining capacities are available to the intermittent generation for capacity firming. In the proposed bilevel optimization model, the lower-level problem is embedded into the upper-level problem applying the optimality Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. The problem is solved by mixed-integer linear programming and the solution is tested and verified on a case study with one wind generator and up to 30,000 prosumers.