Techno-economic and environmental assessment of stationary electricity storage technologies for different time scales

Electricity storage (ES) has the potential of offering several energy system benefits but different technologies also offer different services which can be traded on different markets. In this study, a combined assessment methodology is proposed, enabling a benchmark comparison of stationary electricity storage technologies for different time and system scales, considering their technical, economic and environmental performance. The results show that for short time scale (0.01 h), battery stands out with an advantage in terms of levelised costs, while Advanced Adiabatic (AA-) and Isothermal (I-) Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) have relatively low life cycle Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. For the medium time scale (4.5 h), I-CAES shows the best performance for small scale systems, while for large scale systems, Pumped Hydro Storage (PHS) and AA-CAES show best performance. In our long time scale (seasonal) scenario, Power-to-gas-to-power (P2G2P) has lower levelised costs due to low or avoided investment for storage of gas, but higher GHG emissions than other technologies. If existing reservoirs can be utilized for PHS, it can be economically competitive to P2G2P for seasonal storage. However, storage capacity required for seasonal storage should also be taken into account, for which P2G2P has more flexibility. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.