Revenue Maximization of Electricity Generation for a Wind Turbine Integrated with a Compressed Air Energy Storage System

A high-level supervisory controller is developed for a Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) system integrated with a wind turbine. Complementary to the low-level controllers in our previous works to track generator power and pressure, this controller coordinates different subsystems to optimize the system performance. The control strategy is obtained by solving an optimal storage/ regeneration problem in order to maximize the achievable total revenue from selling electricity to the electric grid. Dynamic Programming (DP) approach is used to solve the corresponding optimal control problem that accounts for all the major losses in the CAES system as well as its nonlinear dynamics. Results show that an increase of 51% in total revenue is achievable by using the CAES system for a conventional wind turbine. Furthermore, a case study has been conducted to investigate the effect of storage system sizing on the maximum revenue.