Electricity generated from renewable sources, such as solar and wind power, offers enormous potential for meeting future energy demands. But access to solar and wind energy is intermittent, whereas electricity must be reliably available for 24 hours a day: Even second-to-second fluctuations can cause major disruptions that cost tens of billions of dollars annually. Electrical energy storage dev...

A hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) has two types of energy storage units, electricity and fuel. Electricity means that a battery (sometimes assisted by ultracaps) is used to store the energy, and that an electromotor (from now on called motor) will be used as traction motor. Fuel means that a tank is required, and that an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE, from now on called engine) is used to gener...

A real-coded genetic algorithm is used to schedule the charging of an energy storage system (ESS), operated in tandem with renewable power by an electricity consumer who is subject to time-of-use pricing and a demand charge. Simulations based on load and generation profiles of typical residential customers show that an ESS scheduled by our algorithm can reduce electricity costs by approximately...

All power generation technologies leave their particular imprint on the power system that they belong to. Wind and solar power have only recently reached significant levels of penetration in some countries, but they are expected to grow much during the next few decades, and contribute substantially to meeting future electricity demand, see e.g. European Commission (2011). Wind, photovoltaic (PV...

The use of photovoltaic (PV) cells in domestic and industrial applications has grown rapidly through the recent years. Constructing PV plants is a very smart measure to produce free electricity in large scales, especially in the countries with higher solar irradiation potential. On the other hand, compressed air energy storage (CAES) has already been proposed to be employed for energy storage a...

Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is one of the large-scale energy storage technologies utilized to provide effective power peak load shaving. In this paper, a coal-fired external combustion CAES, which only uses coal as fuel, is proposed. Unlike the traditional CAES, the combustion chamber is substituted with an external combustion heater in which high-pressure air is heated before entering...

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are becoming a key feature of smart grids. PEVs will be embedded in the network as a mobile load-storage with probabilistic behavior. In order to manage PEVs as flexible loads, charging stations (CSs) have essential roles. In this paper, a new method for optimal sitting and sizing of solar CSs using energy storage (ES) options is presented. Also, behavior of PEV...

The system stability is greatly hampered when green electricity is feed into the conventional electricity network due to intermittent nature of renewable sources. The electricity generation from wind so far predominates than that of other renewable sources. In order to maintain system stability of the electricity network, IEC-61400 (International Electro-technical Commission) standard has defin...