IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2020 - 79

A concept of value multipliers (e.g., US$ per hour for
availability and US$ per MWh for energy exchange) is
proposed where these multipliers, determined using some
form of averaging or levelizing technique, are used to estimate the benefit generated from a service. If configured
to match the pricing and payment structure within a given
market jurisdiction, these estimated values could provide
useful insight for improving ESS value generation. For
instance, if regulation revenue in a market region depends
on regulation capacity and regulation mileage, the value
multipliers could be configured in that way and could also
be updated in real time so that the estimated value provides
a reasonable representation of the revenue generated from
regulation service, with caveats related to the assumptions used for determining the value multipliers. The value
tracker screen also shows the ESS charging cost to prepare
for the services.

Lessons for Electric Utilities
The SSPC ESS control capability expansion project provided useful lessons on enabling multiple use-case operations of ESSs. Electric utilities that intend to incorporate
energy storage within their asset portfolio could benefit
from these lessons. Considering their overall importance to
the advancement of the energy storage industry, some of the
lessons are summarized in this section.
Although the control of an ESS owned by an electric utility could be performed either from a local asset
value maximization perspective or a day-to-day system

operation cost minimization perspective, implementation
of the latter is not a trivial exercise due to its complexity
and lack of adequate information. Launching an ESS operation with a local asset value maximization perspective
could provide important information and knowledge,
which would support the ESS control from a day-to-day
system operation perspective.
Large electric utilities owning generation, transmission,
and distribution assets are typically organized into multiple
groups responsible for many business functions and could
have diverse views on the best use of an asset. While expanding the control capabilities of the SSPC ESS, it was observed
that, in practice, it is difficult to have multiple groups agree
to finalize the use cases to be pursued and obtain the necessary support for implementation. An effective communication strategy would be necessary for the socialization of the
use cases proposed. Economic evaluation from a local asset
benefit maximization perspective could be an effective way
to facilitate this discussion.
Whereas the co-optimization of multiple use cases for
economic benefit evaluation is performed using optimization engines, the field implementation of such engines for
control deployment is not trivial and typically not preferred
by many utilities during the initial phase of the project due
to its complexity and the time and effort required. The utility chose to translate the lessons from the economic evaluation into a set of rules to coordinate and control multiple
use cases. Information obtained from the economic evaluation (e.g., priority ranking, the SoC variation range, typical

figure 11. The value-tracking feature of the SSPC control system.
march/april 2020

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IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2020

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