The Impact of Battery Storage on Power Flow and Economy in an Automated Transactive Energy Market

Abstract

This article explores the use of battery energy storage in a transactive energy approach for a heavily solar-penetrated community. We hypothesize that the efficient market interactions between independently acting, fully automated agents (some equipped with battery energy storage) can result in both bill savings and improvements in power flow, without explicitly optimizing for power flow ahead of time. A test setting of nine typical residential prosumers and one heavily loaded prosumer is used. The heavily loaded prosumer initially experiences multiple undervoltage violations, and a 13.5 kWh battery is installed to alleviate the problem. Two profile-shaping strategies are compared. The first scenario uses greedy control that maximizes self-sufficiency, while the second scenario uses a local market to enable energy trading between participants and a rule-based trading and management agent for control. The results show that the first scenario made minimal improvements to power flow, but the second scenario eliminated all occurrences of under-voltage violations. Furthermore, the total amount of energy from the grid is reduced by 24.3%, and the amount of energy injected into the grid is reduced by 39.2%. This results in lower bills for every participant and a bill reduction of 16.7% for the community as a whole.