Control of Energy Storage

In the attempt to tackle the issue of climate change, governments across the world have agreed to set global carbon reduction targets. For instance, the UK has agreed to reduce the green house gas emissions by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050 [1]. In the pursuit of the carbon reduction, there has been a continuous shift towards the de-carbonisation of major infrastructures such as transport and energy, and an uptake of renewable power generation. An increasing proportion of renewable energy introduces new challenges for the transmission and distribution system operators. The intermittent nature of the renewable energy resources impacts their power output, causing imbalance in supply and demand across the power system. Since the proportion of inverter-fed generation is also likely to increase, the natural inertia of the system would reduce. This in turn causes the grid’s frequency to become less stable and deviate from its target more rapidly than in the present day. Electrification of major infrastructures will cause an additional demand for electricity, which could potentially coincide with existing demand peaks. Furthering this peak demand imposes additional strain on the distribution network, which pushes both its thermal limits and its voltage constraints. Energy storage is often viewed as a silver bullet to buffer the differences between the demand and supply. Additionally, it can improve network operation. With advancements in energy storage technologies, today’s catalogue of energy storage systems offers a wide range of applications to choose from, where all yield some benefit at different levels throughout the entire network. The collection of manuscripts in this editorial provides an insight into some of the cutting edge research on the control of energy storage for power systems.