Impact of the Electricity Market Prices during the COVID-19 Pandemic on Energy Storage Operation
Abstract
With the restructuring and deregulation of the power system, storage owners, generation companies or private producers can offer their multiple services on various power markets and earn income in different types of markets, such as the day-ahead, real-time, ancillary services market, etc. During the COVID-19 pandemic, electricity prices, as well as ancillary services prices, increased significantly. The optimization of the energy storage operation was performed using a suitable model for simulating the operation of a pumped storage hydropower plant under market conditions. The objective function maximizes the income earned through energy arbitration, regulation-up, regulation-down and spinning reserve services. The optimization technique used for solving the objective function is mixed integer linear programming (MILP). In numerical examples, the pumped storage hydropower plant operation has been optimized considering the already achieved hourly electricity market prices from Nord Pool for the pre-pandemic (2019) and the pandemic (2020 and 2021) years. The impact of the electricity market prices during the COVID-19 pandemic on energy storage operation is shown through the analysis of income, operating hours, reserved capacity and consumed energy for each service. The results indicate the role of energy storage during a significant fluctuation in electricity and services prices.
Marin Mandić
Senior Assistant | Researcher | Department of Electrical Intallations and Systems
Researcher and Senior Assistant at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture in Split, with research focus on energy storage technologies and their optimization in market-driven power systems.
Elis Sutlović
Full Professor | Department of Electrical Intallations and Systems
Tonći Modrić
Associate Professor | Department of Electrical Intallations and Systems
Researcher and Full Professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Naval Architecture in Split. His research focus is numerical modeling and calculation of the electric and magnetic fields in power systems and transmission lines, with an emphasis on the development of advanced models for interpreting geoelectrical ground survey data. Additionally, he is involved in the analysis of electromagnetic transients in systems with a high share of renewable energy sources, using finite element techniques.