Estimating energy storage hourly profiles

[grgmiller]

We do not currently have a method for identifying hourly charging/discharging profiles for energy storage, which primarily consists of battery energy storage (energy_source_code == MWH and prime_mover_code == BA) or pumped storage hydro (energy_source_code == WAT and prime_mover_code == PS).

sources of data for charging and discharging

EIA-923 only reports net generation (net discharge) for energy storage technologies, but we do not have any information about the total charging and total discharging from these storage resources.

Furthermore, EIA-930 does not include energy storage as one of fuel types for net generation, but instead this data is theoretically spread between reported demand, hydro generation, and other generation. The EIA-930 instructions note:

Pumped storage: Pumped storage is included in net generation only when there is net output to the system during the hour. During hours when electricity from the system is used on net to store energy, this electricity is to be includedin actual demand.

The EIA-930 instructions do not include any instructions related to other energy storage, but if energy storage is reported consistently with the rules for pumped storage, then discharge would likely be reported as “other” net generation, whereas charging would be reported as increased net demand

Pumped-storage specific considerations

See #37

Potential approaches to estimating storage profiles

As of 2020, there were 230 utility-scale batteries reported in EIA-860, a majority of which are located within the territories of the major RTOs/ISOs in the US. If each of these ISOs report timeseries data for energy storage dispatch separate from the data they report to EIA-930, we could use that data to assign a profile. This means that we would need to ingest data from these sources separately. To do this, we could potentially pull data from the singularity API, pyiso, or potentially ElectricityMap.

If our only option were to interpolate storage profiles, EIA-860, schedule 3-4 also reports the various applications that an energy storage plant served (e.g. load following, excess wind and solar generation, system peak shaving, arbitrage). Using this information, we could develop synthetic storage dispatch profiles based on how we assume these batteries would operate.