Energy storage management in core networks with renewable energy in time-of-use pricing environments

We consider the minimization of electricity cost of a core network where each node has access to solar renewable energy and energy storage in a time-of-use pricing environment. Using an optimization based approach we demonstrate that expenditure on electricity can be reduced by 60% through an effective energy management policy. We also present a distributed, greedy energy management algorithm, which makes hourly electricity purchase and energy storage decisions at each of the nodes in the network and performs close to the optimal case. Finally, we measure the impact of parameters including solar panel size, energy storage capacity and storage charging rate as well as seasonal variations of solar energy on the service provider´s expenditure on electricity.