The impact of electricity storage on wholesale electricity prices

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of electricity storage on the production cost of a power system and the marginal cost of electricity (electricity price) using a unit commitment model. Also real world data has been analyzed to verify the effect of storage operation on the electricity price using econometric techniques. The unit commitment model found that the deployment of a storage system reduces the fuel cost of the power system but increases the average electricity price through its effect on the power system operation. However, the reduction in the production cost was found to be less than the increase in the consumer's cost of electricity resulting in a net increase in costs due to storage. Different storage and CO2 price scenarios were investigated to study the sensitivity of these results. The regression analysis supports the unit commitment results and finds that the presence of storage increases average wholesale electricity prices for the case study system.