Technical and economic feasibility analysis of ESSs implementation both stand-alone and combined with utility-scale non-programmable RES generation

The environmental threat of man-made global warming has prompted the global community to push for an energy transition from fossil fuel sources to low-carbon emitting alternatives. A drastic shift was imposed by the European guidelines in order to promote the creation of community markets and to evaluate alternative way to ensure high levels of reliability of grid due to the growing diffusion of non-programmable renewable sources (NPRS) and the future phase-out of traditional power plant. The solution of investing in electrochemical storage was initially implemented at a European level where 1.8 GW of battery have been installed all around the Europe and they will be triple by the end 2023. Subsequently, also in Italy has been put in action plans that foresee the installation of large electrochemical storage capacities by 2030. In this study we are going to cover the main aspects about the European Regulation Market and the ancillary service already in operation, making a comparison with the Italian Scenario. We are going to evaluate how energy storage system can provide ancillary services to guarantee a more reliable, clean and safe Electricity Grid and evaluating if nowadays it is convenient to perform these kinds of services. More in detail, Li-Ion Battery will be considered in both stand-alone configuration and combined with a Non-Programmable Renewable Resources such PV power plant. In the stand-alone configuration, it will be evaluated the innovative Fast Reserve grid service alone and also the combination of Fast Reserve as priority and arbitrage. Instead for the hybrid configuration, we are going to test the combination of Fast Reserve, Curtailment and Arbitrage for residual hours. After the economic simulation, we are going to understand if the available services are actually viable alone or it’s necessary to add further services. It will be done by estimating the remunerations, payback period and IRRs involving different situations.