Dispatchability of Wind Power with Battery Energy Storage in South Australia

In fiscal year 2016, 42% of electricity generated in South Australia came from intermittent renewable energy sources - a level of penetration that presents challenges to the economic supply of baseload power of acceptable quality. This study measures the improvement in the dispatchability of intermittent renewable energy from an SA wind farm coupled with a utility-scale battery using model predictive control and real-world data published by the Australian Energy Market Operator. The process of wind power dispatch with battery energy storage is represented as an incremental state-space model. The state-space model properly accounts for battery charge/discharge efficiency, and its incremental formulation allows the controller to penalise control effort.