Techno-economic analysis of commercial battery storage systems in Northern Europe

Abstract: As the world looks to lower its need for fossil fuels, photovoltaics has been put forward as one of the proposed solutions. There is, however, one major drawback with the electricity production coming from photovoltaics – it is intermittent and rarely matches the electricity demand profile of society. To overcome this drawback, battery energy storages are a potential solution that can be used to match consumption with production better. When installed at an electricity consuming facility, a battery energy storage system can also provide added benefits such as uninterruptible power supply and so-called “peak-shaving”, using the battery to cut peaks in electricity demand which offloads the facility’s grid connection as well as the local electric grid. This master thesis was conducted in cooperation with a German distributor of photovoltaic- and battery storage systems, EWS, and has studied the technical and financial conditions connected to investments in facility installed battery storages localized at non-household users of electricity in Scandinavia, Poland, and the Netherlands. The thesis has also, through case studies, compared different battery technologies for this purpose, like lithium-ion, sodium-ion, nickel-metal-hydride, and vanadium redox flow batteries. These techno-economical simulations were performed in the simulation software HOMER Grid.