Cloud electricity storage

PI: Ram Rajagopal, Co-PIs: Ramesh Johari, Mohammad Rasouli, Tao Sun, Camille Pache (RTE) and Patrick Panciatici (RTE)

Electrical batteries are able to provide a wide range of services to the electricity system, at all levels of the grid, from the residential consumer to the system operator. With the rapid increase in battery integration with the grid, a better understanding of their potential for business is crucial.

This project studies an innovative business model for the usage of centralized electrical batteries by market players and small individual users, called Cloud Storage. In particular, we focus on two important but challenging problems: how batteries can be shared by end users, as well as other grid services, and to what extent users change their electricity consumption after having battery storage capability.

Empirical tests showing the effectiveness of both models were conducted based on a consumption data set comprising half a million households in California, combined with grid congestion data sets from RTE, the French Transmission System Operator. The future work of this project will be to study optimal contract designs for individual users in the proposed Cloud Storage framework given the estimation of users’ consumption behavior.