Analysis of infrastructure and electric power services from ESS solutions

We tend to imagine the infrastructure of electric power companies as power plants and power transmission lines. However, it has recently included services and solutions according to evolving technologies and changing governmental regulations. We have considered the services and infrastructure at an electric power company by analyzing the solutions that the electric power company would provide using energy storage systems (ESS) in this paper. Regional electric power companies in Japan had been required to provide highly reliable and uniform services before the industrial electric power market was opened in 2000. After that, electric power companies were required to provide high quality and inexpensive services. In addition, electric power companies faced new regulations where the market for electricity was fully open. Regulation changes created opportunities for service innovation. For example, our company could provide peak shaving services to our customers by using ESS. This service could reduce electrical charges and avoid power outages by ESS being installed at 100 customer sites. When we analyzed the characteristics of these services, we found two keywords. The first was distributed and the second was co-operation. We created a model of electric power services and we would like to expand electricity services with this model.