Sizing of Lead Acid Storage System in an Energy Buffer Connected to a Wind Farm

Global warming and excessive use of non-renewable energy resources are some of the most serious problems facing the society. Therefore, renewable and sustainable energy systems such as wind generation are gaining increasing importance as solutions to these problems. The wind power, however, tends to fluctuate due to intermittency of wind speed whose variation is stochastic in nature. These fluctuations can be a source of voltage and frequency problems. In this paper, a design process of energy storage system, using lead acid batteries, within a buffer scheme is described. The Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) moderates the effects of intermittency of power generated from wind farms. The optimization problem is formulated to play the economic benefit from the sale of the dispatched power against the cost of BESS. The result of optimization gives the optimal size of BESS, to provide the most probable smoothing of wind power over the planning horizon. A probability distribution function (pdf) is created to represent the optimal size of BESS for the planning horizon and then a case study for one year is conducted to illustrate the application of the proposed method.