The impact of electricity storage on wholesale electricity prices

This paper analyzes the impact of electricity storage on the production cost of a power system and the marginal cost of electricity (electricity price) using a unit commitment model. Also real world data has been analyzed to verify the e®ect of storage operation on the electricity price using econometric techniques. The unit commitment model found that the deployment of a storage system reduces the fuel cost of the power system but increases the average electricity price through its e®ect on the power system operation. However, the reduction in the production cost was found to be less than the increase in the consumer's cost of electricity resulting in a net increase in costs due to storage. Di®erent storage and CO2 price scenarios were investigated to study the sensitivity of these results. The regression analysis supports the unit commitment results and ¯nds that the presence of storage increases average wholesale electricity prices for the case study system.