Look-ahead decision making for renewable energy: A dynamic “predict and store” approach

Abstract This paper presents an integrative methodology for managing and stabilizing the output of a wind/solar farm using storage devices in a cost effective and real-time manner. We consider the problem where a renewable farm should decide the amount of energy charged into, or withdrawn from, the battery given the stochastic and time-varying nature in the renewable energy power output. Our methodology features a seamless integration of a non-myopic decision framework and a sequential non-parametric predictive model based on functional principal component analysis. A key feature of our algorithm is that it quantifies costs over a rolling horizon where both predictions and decisions are updated on the fly as new data is acquired. Our technology is tested on the California ISO dataset. The case study provides a proof-of-concept that highlights both the benefits and ease of implementation of our forward looking framework.