A survey on energy storage resources configurations in order to propose an optimum configuration for smoothing fluctuations of future large wind power plants

As the wind power capacity increases, the effect of wind power fluctuations on the system stability becomes more significant. Despite its high costs, utilizing energy storage resources such as batteries is inevitable in the smoothing process of wind power fluctuations. In a wind power plant, the place where batteries are located has considerable direct effect on their required capacity and thus on the initial investment cost. Therefore, in this paper a suitable configuration which significantly reduces the batteries investment cost is proposed and then the wind power fluctuation of a large wind power plant connected to a smart distribution grid is smoothed. Additionally, existing configurations for installing batteries in large wind power plants are investigated. The proposed configuration utilizes smart parks as aggregated storage resources in load side and an aggregated battery energy storage system with limited capacity in plant side as well. Therefore, in addition to accurate smoothing of wind power fluctuations, the energy storage investment cost is reduced significantly utilizing the proposed configuration. Simulation studies in MATLAB software package are carried out to verify the performance of the proposed approach.