Optimal Control of Battery Energy Storage for Wind Farm Dispatching

Integrating a battery energy storage system (BESS) with a large wind farm can make a wind farm more dispatchable. This paper focuses on development of a control strategy for optimal use of the BESS for this purpose. The paper considers an open-loop optimal control scheme to incorporate the operating constraints of the BESS, such as state of charge limits, charge/discharge current limits, and lifetime. The goal of the control is to have the BESS to provide as much smoothing as possible, so that the wind farm can be dispatched on an hourly basis based on the forecasted wind conditions. The effectiveness of this control strategy has been tested by using an actual wind farm data. Furthermore, a real-time implementation strategy using model predictive control is also proposed. Finally, it is shown that the control strategy is very important in improving the BESS performance for this application.