A techno- economic analysis of Li-ion battery energy storage systems in support of PV distributed generation

Energy storage systems (ESS) have recently been subject of a widespread interest among the energy market. This great relevance is due to the opportunity of ESS to overcome or, at least, mitigate the drawbacks caused by the intermittency and uncertainty of renewable energy sources (RES), that are posing relevant challenges to the operation and management of electrical power grids. In this context, ESS could also play a key role in increasing the host capacity of RES, the reliability of electricity distribution systems and the share of self-consumption of distributed energy resources (DER). Among the different ESS technologies, the lithium ion (Li-ion) is considered one of the most promising, thanks to its favorable characteristics in terms of energy conversion efficiency, energy and power density and lifetime. However, nowadays Li-ion batteries have high investment costs and their economic feasibility is still uncertain. The aim of this work is to assess the economic feasibility of the application of Li-ion batteries in support of distributed generation (DG), by evaluating the total cost of ownership (TCO) under different scenarios. The proposed method has been applied to a real-world application, performing a sensitivity analysis of the numerical results in order to evaluate the effects of the variability in the parameters.