Scientists from Norway’s Institute for Energy Technology have assessed the profitability of battery storage in hybrid hydropower and floating PV plants. They have found that the profitability of such facilities could be increased by up to 2%.
The scientists ran cost-optimal assessments for systems with and without batteries, and then compared their profitability in light of capacity markets, ancillary services, and energy arbitrage.
“This paper investigates the profitability potential for a viable business case for battery storage integration with utility-scale hybrid hydropower-solar photovoltaic plants,” they said. “It is based on a hypothetical, two-reservoir cascaded hydropower plant in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
The optimization model adjusted the capacity of the floating PV and the battery. The south-oriented floating PV system, with a fixed 13-degree tilt, used crystalline silicon PV modules with 19.9% efficiency and total system losses of 13%. The Li-ion LFP battery incorporated irradiation levels from the PVGIS SARAH2 dataset, a web application providing solar radiation and PV system energy production data.
“The co-optimized case, in which both battery and [floating PV] are optimized for cost-efficiency, increases profitability by 0.6% compared to the base case,” they said.
The academics presented their findings in “Profitability of battery storage in hybrid hydropower–solar photovoltaic plants,” which was recently published in the Journal of Energy Storage.
Image: Institute for Energy Technology, Journal of Energy Storage, CC BY 4.0 DEED
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