Dynamic Modeling of Community Energy Storage for Lifetime Estimation During Islanding

Abstract

This paper implements a dynamic model of “community energy storage,” a 25 kWh transformer-level battery system, to show its ability to island downstream electric loads during a grid outage. We utilize one-minute electric demand and rooftop photovoltaic generation data collected in Austin, Texas with the dynamic model to quantify how long community energy storage could island downstream loads before its minimum cutoff voltage is reached and it is brought offline. Our results show that photovoltaics nearly triple the average islanding lifetime of community energy storage during outages occurring in the morning, highlighting the symbiosis between distributed energy storage and distributed photovoltaic generation.