(346d) On the Use of Multistage Stochastic Programming for the Design of Grid Scale Energy Storage Systems

It is widely recognized that a major concern with renewable energy is the fact that wind and solar sources are non-dispatchable. That is, the power produced from renewable sources is dependent on environmental conditions and is likely uncorrelated with the power demand from load centers. While fossil based sources are dispatchable and currently have the ability to respond to the full range of consumer loads, the additional range imposed by renewable sources is expected to exceed the dispatch capability of these fossil plants at the point of 20% renewable power. Thus, many have advocated the use of massive energy storage systems to provide the additional level of dispatch capability required to maintain grid solvency.

Due to the uncertainty of consumer demand as well as that of renewable generation, the problem of optimal placement of these storage units within the grid along with the selection of equipment sizes must be formulated as a stochastic program. However, rather than being a fairly simple two-stage stochastic program, the dynamics imposed by the storage devices requires the formulation to be of the far more challenging multistage class.

In this work, we propose a novel approximate solution procedure for this class of multistage stochastic programming problems. The approach utilizes the computational efficiency of the recently developed method of Economic Linear Optimal Control (ELOC) and its extension Constrained ELOC. The proposed method occurs in two stages. The first is a global search over the here-and-now variables as well as the parameters of the ELOC policy. However, this first search assumes a statistical constraint enforcement mechanism (similar to chance constrained optimization). In the second step is a gradient based search over the here-and-now variables, but used the Constrained ELOC policy to enforce point-wise-in-time constraints. To address the possible occurrence of an infeasible solution from the Constrained ELOC policy a fairly simple barrier type approach is used to improve convergence properties.