Operational management of renewable energy systems with storage using an optimisation-based simulation methodology

It has been widely recognised that renewable energy, such as wind, provides valuable benefits for the environment, human health, and the economy. Nevertheless, renewable energy has several drawbacks: high variability in its availability, uncertainty in its forecast, and difficulty in matching production to demand. The storage of energy would enable solving of most of these problems. In this paper, we obtain operative management policies for energy storage under two criteria: maximising the profit of selling the energy and maximising the reliability of the system as a provider of committed energy. Decisions take into account data concerning the structure of selling prices and penalties, as well as updated probabilistic wind speed forecasts. We use a sequence of rolling horizon stochastic optimisation problems to determine the parameters of the proposed management strategies. To solve these problems we propose a simulation-based optimisation methodology.