Placement and sizing of battery energy storage for primary frequency control in an isolated section of the Mexican power system

Increasing penetration levels of inverter-interfaced generation impose challenging frequency control problems to power system operation since frequency response capabilities are reduced as conventional generation is displaced by renewable energy sources. To face these challenges, alternatives such as Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs) are necessary to provide advanced and enhanced frequency support. However, improper location and size of BESSs may greatly affect the performance and economic cost of their particular application. Based on this, an approach for the placement and sizing of BESS for primary frequency support in an isolated power system is presented in this study. BESS location and size are determined according to the most severe contingency for generation outage and different penetration levels of converter based renewable generation in the test system. Under these considerations, the transmission system bus with the larger frequency decline is identified for BESS placement. On the other hand, BESS sizing is formulated as a constrained optimization problem, with a defined cost function to be minimized. An iterative process based on the Bat Optimization Algorithm (BOA) is used in this work to determine the selected parameters to be optimized. For comparison purposes, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach is also included to deal with the formulated optimization problem. Simulation results show that system frequency response can be improved with the approach proposed in this study. Besides, the use of BOA based alternative is seen to perform relatively better than the GA approach in this case.