Evaluating the Effect of Storage in California Electric Grid

Historically, the state of California has implemented energy efficiency and emission restriction policies to mitigate climate change emissions, especially those in the transportation sector. The regulations encouraging adoption of EVs indicate a higher level of electric demand in the near future. It seems one potential solution for achieving GHG emission reduction and meeting the increasing electricity demand at the same time is to adopt a higher proportion of renewable resources energy for power generation. However, one of the biggest concerns for integrating large amounts of renewable resources into California's electricity grid is their reliability and availability. Most of the renewable resources can only be supplied to the grid when available, regardless of the system load. Energy storage is considered to be one of several potentially important enabling technologies supporting large-scale deployment of renewable energy. This thesis explores the impact of introducing storage technology on the existing power grid against rapidly growing electricity demand. To achieve that, we develop a least-cost dispatch model, EDGE-NET, for the California electricity grid including storage. Under this model, we investigate the effect of storage in reducing the total costs and increasing the portion of clean resources used in electricity production in comparison to the scenario without any storage technology. To some extent, energy storage allows greater use of variable renewables by shifting energy use from periods of low demand to periods of high demand, especially under the scenario that the supply level of renewable resources is not tightly constrained.