Energy Storage Modeling
It is obvious that the future of the renewable economy is going to require Energy Storage (a.k.a. Battery Storage or PV plus Storage – PVS). Therefore, your modeling software must have the ability to model energy storage along with your PV production. PlantPredict was one of the first modeling software on the market to enable PV plus storage modeling and we continue to improve our capabilities and algorithm options.
With PlantPredict Premium you get 2 out-of-the-box dispatch algorithms:
- Energy Available – This algorithm will store energy as soon as it is available as long as their is battery capacity available. Then will dispatch the energy in the time period you specify with our target period selector. This will allow you to model a very simple solution for the duck curve where you charge the battery in the morning as the sun is coming up and then save the energy for late afternoon/evening.
- Interconnect Excess – This algorithm will take the excess energy (energy that would normally be clipped) above your LGIA limit and store it in the battery for use during a target period that you specify. This is designed for situations where a developer may want to overbuild a PV power plant beyond the LGIA limit of the grid and then utilize that power after the sun goes down.
PlantPredict Premium also includes a Custom Dispatch option, which will allow you to upload a charge/discharge signal in a time series format so that you can model a custom algorithm that is proprietary to your organization for a specific opportunity and application. This gives you maximum flexibility and control of your Energy Storage modeling.
You can access the Energy Storage feature from the PlantPredict main prediction builder screen.
This is the Energy Storage parameter screen. Here you can enter in all the different parameters that affect an energy storage system. Many of the parameters are defaulted, as defined in your company default settings (image to follow)
After parameters are inserted, you specify how you want the energy storage to be dispatched. There are 3 options within PlantPredict – Interconnect Excess, Energy available, and a custom option. Additionally, once the dispatch algorithm is chosen at the top, you can specify your dispatch window. Any square that has a blue check mark will tell PlantPredict to discharge all available energy stored in the battery at the rate indicated by the total storage inverter size. In the example here, our storage system will dispatch 12pm-6pm, April through September.
Interconnect Excess
Energy Available
Custom Template.
The custom template is easy to fill out. For every index of the weather file, you specify a) whether you want the storage system to charge or discharge, and b) how fast you want the charging/discharging, as a fraction of the inverter size.
Easily review and understand the prediction results that include energy storage, including the energy produced, loss factors…
and the dispatch window in the 12×24
Company Administrators can update company settings and change the defaults for your storage system
As you can see, the Energy Storage modeling functionality of PlantPredict premium is both simple and sophisticated. This will allow any PV modeler to model Storage very quickly without a long learning curve.
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