Electrical energy storage for industrial grid fee reduction – A large scale analysis

Abstract

While grid fees have a major impact on energy costs of large consumers, they can be reduced via peak shaving using electrical energy storages, like lithium ion, lead acid, or redox flow batteries. Especially in Germany, there are further options, namely making use of intensive and atypical grid usage, to reduce the regular grid fee. In the present analysis, we examined load profiles of more than 5,300 company sites and checked under which circumstances electrical energy storage can be profitably applied to reduce the grid fee in the three mentioned ways. Here, the calculation of each company specific grid fee was performed compliant to the German regulatory scheme with fixed power- and energy-dependent prices as well as considering the actual prices charged by the connected grid operators.The analysis showed, that the power price for grid usage as well as the investment costs for energy storages are most important for the profitability of general peak shaving, while the concrete shape of the load profile determines the capacity with the shortest payback period. The intensive grid usage is the most promising revenue model, if the formal requirements are met. The atypical grid usage is the second most profitable approach. In most cases, lithium ion storages were most cost-effective, compared to lead acid and redox flow batteries. A future reduction of storage investment costs will lead to an increase of profitable projects especially concerning the individual grid fees. For the general grid fee, a massive price reduction of more than 50 % is necessary to achieve payback periods of less than five years for a noteworthy number of company sites.