Trends of application and control technology of battery energy storage for power systems

Recently, application and control technology of battery energy storage systems (BESS) in the power systems have made remarkable progress due to advance in the storage battery technology and rapid penetration of the variable renewable energy sources, such as photovoltaic generations and wind turbines. As a countermeasure to the issues caused by high penetration of variable renewable energy sources, a considerable number of demonstration projects on BESS for the power systems have been conducted domestically and overseas. In these projects, the results have been steadily achieved, and some have already been utilized for the power system operation. In this context, the application of BESS in the power system is considered to shift from the trial to the practical phase and is expected to increase in the near future. Hence in this paper, the background of the installation and the application purpose of BESS to the power system and the trends of applied technology to the power system are overviewed. © 2017 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.