Stochastic scenario-based model and investigating size of battery energy storage and thermal energy storage for micro-grid

Energy storage systems (ESS) are designed to accumulate energy when production exceeds demand and to make it available at the user's request. They can help match energy supply and demand, exploit the variable production of renewable energy sources (e.g. solar and wind), increase the overall efficiency of the energy system and reduce CO2 emissions. This paper presents a unit commitment formulation for micro-grid that includes a significant number of grid parallel PEM-Fuel Cell Power Plants (PEM-FCPPs) with ramping rate and minimum up and down time constraints. The aim of this problem is to determine the optimum size of energy storage devices like hydrogen, thermal energy and battery energy storages in order to schedule the committed units' output power while satisfying practical constraints and electrical/thermal load demand over one day with 15 min time step. In order to best use of multiple PEM-FCPPs, hydrogen storage management is carried out. Also, since the electrical and heat load demand are not synchronized, it could be useful to store the extra heat of PEM-FCPPs in the peak electrical load in order to satisfy delayed heat demands. Due to uncertainty nature of electrical/thermal load, photovoltaic and wind turbine output power and market price, a two-stage scenario-based stochastic programming model, where the first stage prescribes the here-and-now variables and the second stage determines the optima value of wait-and-see variables under cost minimization. Quantitative results show the usefulness and viability of the suggested approach.