Cloud Energy Storage Based Embedded Battery Technology Architecture for Residential Users Cost Minimization

This paper presents a cloud energy storage (CES) architecture for reducing energy costs for residential microgrid users. The former of this article concentrates on identifying an appropriate battery technology from various battery technologies with the aid of a simulation study. The later part addresses the economic feasibility of the storage architecture with three different scenarios namely grid connected energy storage, distributed energy storage (DES) and CES. The performance of the proposed architecture has been evaluated by considering five residential users with suitable battery technology identified from the former part of the study. For the purpose of the analysis, PV and load profiles including seasonal effects and grid price were taken from IIT Mumbai, India and IEX portal, respectively. In addition, this article also examines the impact of increased number of users with CES. The value of this study is that the proposed CES architecture is capable of reducing the cost of electricity experienced by the user by 11.37% as compared to DES. With this, CES operator's revenue can be increased by 6.70% in summer and 16.97% in winter in the case of fixed number of users. Finally, based on the analysis and simulation results, this paper recommends CES with Li-ion battery technology for residential application.