Achieving both Economic and Environmental Objectives for a Solar Farm with Co-located Battery

Energy storage must play a part in a future world powered by intermittent low-carbon sources such as wind and solar power. It is often taken for granted that grid-scale battery storage is too expensive unless offering multiple ancillary services to the electrical grid, rather than just absorbing and later exporting renewable energy that would otherwise be curtailed. This belief is confirmed and quantified in this work, by simulating a solar PV farm with generation capacity exceeding its grid export limit, using battery storage to avoid some curtailment. The required carbon price for the system to break even financially, when optimizing for lifetime CO2 emission savings, is well above even the World Bank’s recommendation to avoid catastrophic climate change. This indicates the need for dramatic reduction in the cost of energy storage, and for revenue streams in addition to simply the sale of otherwise-curtailed energy. Keywordssolar PV; battery; curtailment avoidance; CO2 emissions; techno-economic analysis