Abstract
The exploitation of distributed renewable energy sources leads to a low-carbon energy transition, mainly based on the optimal integration of hydro, PV and wind power plants with the remaining high-performance fossil-fuel power stations. In the last twenty years, European Union (EU) countries have shown a significant increase of the power installed in new PV and wind power plants, together with the refurbishment of small and medium size hydro stations. In particular, in Italy, PV and wind energy production has strongly increased and nowadays there are regions characterized by a very green energy mix. In this new scenario, energy storage becomes a viable solution to mitigate the variability of renewable energy sources thus optimizing the network operation. The present paper is focused on the Liguria region, in the North of Italy and in particular on the Bormida Valley where nowadays more than the half of the annual electricity consumption is covered by the renewable energy local production. The paper describes the current energy situation and proposes an optimization tool to investigate the possibility of installing new PV and wind power plants, as well as energy intensive storage units based on sodium-sulphur batteries; moreover, different scenarios are analyzed through the definition of economic and environmental key performance indicators.
Highlights
The Vision 2050 of the European Commission has set important goals in the energy sector to protect the environment, create affordable and market-based energy services and ensure security, reliability and resilience of energy supply [1]
This paper has proposed a methodology to optimally design and manage a sustainable energy system, composed of renewable energy power plants and storage batteries, used to provide electricity to a defined territory such as a region or a valley
The methodology is based on a mixed-integer linear programming model used to determine the set of energy technologies to be installed in the examined territory with the aim of minimizing an objective function related to global costs and carbon dioxide emissions
Summary
The Vision 2050 of the European Commission has set important goals in the energy sector to protect the environment, create affordable and market-based energy services and ensure security, reliability and resilience of energy supply [1]. A detailed analysis of the current issues related to the installation of grid scale electricity storage systems (ESS) is reported in References [9,18]: the authors highlight the lack of standards and procedures for connecting, operating and maintaining ESSs and the need of new policies supporting a higher remuneration to ESSs participating to ancillary services and capacity markets They focus the attention on distributed generation coupled with storage and demand response and conclude that only properly planned and managed energy facilities with renewables and storage can provide benefits to the power system, in terms of loss reduction, improved reliability and security and emission reduction.
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