ANALYSIS OF GRID-CONNECTED BATTERY ENERGY STORAGE AND PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEMS FOR BEHIND-THE-METER APPLICATIONS : Case Study for a commercial building in Sweden

Abstract: Lithium-ion battery enables major changes to current electricity consumption patterns and can finally transform renewable and local, but intermittent, energy production into systems for secure and stable energy supply. However, battery brings several challenges. Notably regarding how it should be utilized to maximize its value generation and lifetime. Batteries can be used for different purposes like photovoltaic surplus utilization, peak-shaving, price arbitrage and other services for the electric grid. The utilization management, i.e. when and how to charge and discharge them in various situations, needs to be optimized. This thesis aims to design different modelings in order to dimension and analyze the behavior of lithium-ion batteries for different strategies from self-consumption, peak-shaving to price arbitrage management. The developed models are implemented in Matlab and simulations run on real data from a Swedish commercial center. Simulation results based on data from 2015 implies that current market price for batteries is too high to allow the investigated revenue streams to make battery investments economically feasible. However, the available data does not reflect all interesting dynamics and characteristics for a commercial center which might influence the obtained economic result of the analysis. This thesis was thus focused on the modeling processes in order to dimension and analyze the behavior of any battery-photovoltaic system for a wide range of loads such as: residential buildings, commercial buildings and industries.