Virtual integration technology of distributed energy storages

Widely spread renewable energies (REs) will destabilize electricity supply-demand balancing because of their uncontrollability and unpredictability. Therefore effective balancing technology is required. We focus on distributed energy storages (ESs) and propose a novel balancing technology using distributed ESs, “Virtual Integration (VI) of distributed ESs”. VI enables us to control multiple ESs as a concentrated single ES: VI can make ESs respond quicker, control electric-charge/discharge of ESs precisely, and achieve reliable property of ESs. The feature of VI is that by regarding the difference in dynamic status of each ES as a functional characteristic of ES, a virtually integrated ES is built to create new functions by arranging functional characteristics appropriately. In other words, VI technology properly assigns real-time charging/discharging power to each ES on the basis of each characteristic. For an example of reliable control of ESs, we numerically demonstrated VI suppresses capacity degradation of lithium Ion batteries by 20%.