Dispatch performance analysis of PV power plants using various energy storage capacities

This paper presents a methodology to evaluate and estimate the dispatch performance of a 30 MW PV power plant including a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) of various capacities. The HESS, consisting of a vanadium redox battery (VRB) and a supercapacitor bank (SCB) with a power rating ratio between the two energy storage technologies of 5:1, is connected at the point of common coupling (PCC) to support the PV power plant to comply with the dispatch rules in the Australian national electricity market. A high performance computing cluster was used to perform a large amount of simulations for an investigation period of one month, using detailed equivalent models of the HESS. A mathematical relation between the dispatch performance and the HESS capacities is developed through quantitative analyses of extensive simulation data.