Exploitation of Battery Energy Storage in Load Frequency Control -A Literature Survey

Deregulation of the electricity market and the continued attempts by the international community to reduce the effects of global climate change have resulted in a rapid increase in the usage of different renewable forms of energy such as the wind and solar energy. The availability of such renewables is highly sporadic in nature. Consequently, their integration into the power system is a practice not without unfavorable impacts on the stability of the power system. The stability of the power system frequency is vulnerable to sudden imbalances between generation and demand. Therefore, the intermittent generation from the renewables imposes undesirable frequency fluctuations. Load Frequency Control (LFC) is the control scheme responsible for restoring system frequency to its rated value after any generation-demand imbalance that causes the frequency to deviate from the rated value. Therefore, efficient and fast LFC techniques are crucial. Utilization of Battery Energy Storage (BES) is one of the techniques applied to improve the performance of LFC due to its distinctive characteristics of fast response and high energy density. This paper is aimed to provide a succinct and comprehensive literature survey of the different concepts and strategies of the utilization of battery energy storage systems for LFC services. The study was conducted by reviewing, collating and interpreting numerous research papers on the relevant topics. Based on the BES scale, location, control, ownership and coordination with the system operator, the existing strategies are classified into two main categories: Grid-Scale Systems (GSS) and Load-Scale Systems (LSS). The LSS category is sub-classified as Coordinated Aggregate Systems and Non-Coordinated Individual Systems. The survey theoretically discussed the advantages and disadvantages of each category from a technical perspective.