Analysis on impact of shared energy storage in residential community: Individual versus shared energy storage

Considering a scenario where residential consumers are equipped with solar photovoltaic (PV) panels integrated with energy storage while shifting the portion of their electricity demand load in response to time-varying electricity price, i.e., demand response, this study is motivated to analyze the practical benefits of using shared energy storage in residential communities. The main objective of this study is to compare individual and shared energy storage operations economically (in terms of electricity cost) and operationally (in terms of energy storage use) with various parameter settings. We propose mathematical optimization models formulated to find optimal energy operations of individual and shared energy storage so that the best practices can be compared. Through the analysis of the optimal shared energy storage operations resulting from the mathematical optimization model, we intend to discover underlying patterns that can be used for developing efficient control policies tailored to shared energy storage use. We conduct numerical experiments using real historical data, and the results show that shared energy storage results in electricity cost saving with higher utilization compared to individual energy storage. Cost savings and energy storage utilization improvements up to 13.82% and 38.98%, respectively, exist when using shared energy storage instead of individual energy storage. We find that the maximum charging/discharging rate parameters have the most significant effect on individual and shared energy storage settings. We provide useful insights about how to assign residential consumers to shared energy storage and how to control changing and discharging shared energy storage by multiple consumers.