System level assessment of PV and energy storage: Application to the Great Britain power system

The main aim of this work is to add to the debate about the potential roles of photovoltaics (PV) and storage in the future GB power system. To do so, this paper has developed models to assess the system level performance of coordinated PV and storage in terms of the provision of system capacity and operational implications. More specifically, on the one hand, in the days with system critical peak demands, a centralised control strategy is considered to use storage to shift the energy generated by PV to supply system demand at peak times; on the other hand, in the rest of the year, storage is then controlled in a distributed way to primarily maximise the self-consumption of solar energy and secondly minimise the instantaneous feed-in power from PV panels. Afterwards, the contribution to system capacity from coordinated PV and storage is evaluated by using a capacity credit assessment, while the operational implications are analysed by focusing on the overall system operational cost and the amount of PV generation that needs to be curtailed. In summary, according to the assessments, it has been found that in the case of GB, the proposed coordinated control of PV and storage can, but to a limited extent, contribute to the provision of system capacity, reduce system operational cost, and increase the utilisation of solar energy.