Can Energy Storage Add Value to Future Urban Planning and Operation?

Residential electricity demand is expected to rise in the next few decades due to the electrification of heating and transportation. Both European and UK national policies suggest that efforts should be made to reduce carbon emissions and increase the share of renewable energy, an important element of which is encouraging generation, typically photovoltaic (PV), in partnership with energy storage systems in the residential sector. The scale of the energy storage system is important, with community energy storage (CES) and household energy storage (HES) being the two principal systems used in the residential sector. Many advantages of CES over HES have been identified, but the performance and impact on individual households within CES require further analysis. In this study an agent-based model is proposed to investigate and analyse CES based on a range of criteria. Results indicate that both HES and CES can significantly reduce the grid peak power import grid and export to the grid, improve the community self-consumption rate (SCR) and self-sufficiency rate (SSR), and contribute to much higher energy saving. Time-of-Use (TOU) tariffs can effectively shave peak demand and lower energy bills of households, but do not improve SCR and SSR. The economic feasibility of storage can be improved by 1) combining different services and tariffs to obtain more revenues for households; 2) more legislative and financial support to reduce system costs; and 3) more innovative business models and policies to optimise revenues with existing resource. Lastly, in order to encourage adoption of PV and storage, it is important to compare the UK to a country with successful applications and comprehensive policy support. The study therefore compares and contrasts CES in the UK and Germany. Results indicate that the primary impacting factor on SCR is solar generation. The results highlight the importance of using a location-specific approach for system planning. Households in Germany should aim to improve the utilisation of on-site generation by installing a larger storage system, whilst UK households should improve total renewable generation output, for example by using a hybrid PV plus wind turbine system. In addition, more financial and legislative support is needed in the UK to improve feasibility of HES and CES.