Evaluation of a very large scale PV power system with energy storage for capacity firming

Current technology developments in energy storage and PV systems raise new possibilities for combining them, in order to deal with grid integration of PV systems. This paper studies the operation of a very large scale PV power plant, which includes an energy storage system for capacity firming. The energy storage is distributed in the PV plant, i.e. many energy storage units are connected in parallel with each PV array before the central solar inverter. The benefits of this configuration are explained in the paper, whose scope is to evaluate the complete system. A tool has been created in order to perform the sizing of the energy storage, according to a desired operation and evaluate the system using the LCOE.