Study on compressed air energy storage coupled with a wind farm

Nowadays because of increase in fuel consumption and reduction of fossil fuels and consequently higher fuel costs as well as harmful effects of such fuels on environment, much attention is being paid to renewable energy sources. Due to their stochastic nature, power generation from renewable sources is unpredictable. Therefore, if a higher level of penetration of these sources exists, the electricity industry would encounter a challenge to match electricity supply and demand. A suitable way to overcome this challenge is using energy storage systems. Various types of energy storage systems include batteries, pumped hydroelectric storage and flywheels. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) which uses compressed air as a medium to store energy is another kind of energy storage that can be used in large scales. By using CAES in the wind farm whenever electricity demand is low, the generated electricity can be used for air compression, then in the peak demand or when wind farm is not able to generate, stored energy can be used for electricity generation. In this paper CAES is introduced and matlab/simulink model of a wind farm coupled with a CAES is presented.