Hi Paul,
thank you for the guidance. I had been using the Merchant Plant case, which seems quite similar to the single user, but also provided an interface to the Cambium energy market estimates of future pricing, so I didn’t have to build that series from scratch.
I think, in the end, simple use of a battery for arbitrage with high cycle rates is difficult to justify on the economics. Our Light Department anticipates the big financial benefit will come from reducing peak demands for energy from the ISO during the ISO’s highest demand hours, resulting in reduced assessments for wider grid infrastructure. These reductions depend on predicting grid demand levels, dispatching strategically, and require using a probabilistic model assigning a likelihood of success with the strategy each month.
All of this falls outside of what SAM can model, but represents the lion’s share of the value to our Light Department. We will proceed with spreadsheets for these externalities, importing relevant outputs from SAM where appropriate. I am including a few links to a study project conducted in 2016 and implemented in 2018 for a sister light department in Sterling MA. This highlights the economic value of strategic peak shaving within our ISO-NE environment.
Pre-project analysis
sandia.gov/ess-ssl/docs/journals/SterlingMA_2017PES_SAND2017-1093.pdf
1year operational results
www.cesa.org/wp-content/uploads/Sterling-case-study.pdf
Thank you for your help.
Best,
Dean
