Feasibility Analysis of a Battery Energy Storage System combined with a Utility-Scale Solar PV Power Plant in the Atacama Desert

Federico Baldasso

Key information

Authors:

Federico Baldasso (Federico Baldasso)

Supervisors:

Rui Manuel Gameiro de Castro (Rui Manuel Gameiro de Castro)

Published in

10/20/2021

Abstract

Nowadays the trends are indicating that the world will face different problems related to the CO2 emissions if the use of conventional energy sources is kept as it was in the past years. Therefore, there is a global need for incorporating renewable energy sources into the grid. The aim of this project thesis is to study the feasibility of a battery energy storage system combined with the photovoltaic power plant Campos del Sol in Chile, located in the Atacama Desert. In order to study the economic feasibility, different configurations of battery energy storage systems have been analyzed with the software Matlab. The power of the BESS taken in consideration are 50MW, 100MW, 150MW, 200MW and for each power a capacity of 1, 2, 3, 4 hours has been studied. A sensitivity analysis has been done by changing the Energy Prices (creating 3 different price scenarios where each scenario multiplies the real value of the energy price by a multiplicative coefficient that depends on the production of photovoltaic energy) and the Initial BESS cost (considering a decrease of 30% of the actual BESS cost). With the actual battery costs and energy prices, the proposed solution is still not economically feasible (the configuration with the best results has a final NPV of -17.982.354 €). The best results are reached with the configuration 200 MW 800 MWh Energy Prices scenario 3 (that is the scenario with the highest multiplicative coefficient) and the final NPV is of the order of +59 M€.