Practical Use of the Energy Management System with Day-Ahead Electricity Prices

Our goal was to define a possible profit resulting from the use of batteries as an electric energy storage (EES) device in apartment buildings or small houses as typical households. Focus was on the theoretical and practical studies of an energy management system (EMS) and financial analysis of investments return. Use of a battery bank charge-discharge-schedule (BCDS) allows an optimal operation of EES. The benefits lie in importing and storing more energy at low price periods while decreasing the imported power from the grid at high price periods and dispatching the stored energy for load demands. The BCDS is optimized by help of the price and load forecast, at the same time guaranteeing load demand supply. Nord Pool Spot day-ahead market provides all required data for the EMS to evaluate the cost of imported energy in each period of time. The optimization algorithm creates the best BCDS to bring the highest profit to the end customer. The calculations were tested in a laboratory on the EMS to confirm the theoretical part.