【Time】1:30PM-2:30PM on Thursday October 15, 2015

【Venue】Room 510, Shunde Building  

【Title】 Joint Planning of Wind Energy Storage and Transmission 

【Speaker】Wei Qi, University of California, Berkeley

【Host】Dr. Xiaobo Zhao

【Abstract】Regions with abundant wind resources usually have no ready access to the existing electric grid. However, building transmission lines that instantaneously deliver all geographically distributed wind energy can be costly. Energy storage (ES) systems can help reduce the cost of bridging wind farms and grid, and mitigate the intermittency of wind outputs. In this work, we propose models of transmission network planning with co-location of ES systems. Our models determine the sizes and sites of ES systems as well as the associated topology and capacity of the transmission network under the feed-in-tariff policy instrument. We first formulate a location model as a mixed integer second-order-conic program to solve for the ES-transmission network design with uncapacitated storage.  Then we propose a method to choose ES sizes by deriving a closed-form upper bound. The major insight is that, in most cases, using even small-sized ES systems can significantly reduce the total expected cost, but their marginal values diminish faster than those of the transmission lines as their capacities expand. Despite uncertainties in climate, technologies and construction costs, the cost-efficient infrastructure layout is remarkably robust. We also identify the major bottleneck cost factors for different forms of ES technologies. 

【Bio】Wei Qi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at University of California, Berkeley. He is also a graduate student researcher in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research interests include design and management of supply chains and energy systems, sustainable operations and data analytics. He received an M.S. degree from University of California, Los Angeles and a B.E. degree from Zhejiang University, China.