Seasonal Energy Storage Operations with Limited Flexibility

Abstract

The value of seasonal energy storage depends on how the firm best operates the storage to capture the seasonal price spread. Energy storage operations typically face limited operational flexibility characterized by the speed of storing and releasing energy. A widely used practice-based heuristic, the rolling intrinsic (RI) policy, generally performs well, but can significantly underperform in some cases. In this paper, we aim to understand the gap between the RI policy and the optimal policy, and design improved heuristic policies to close or reduce this gap. A new heuristic policy, the “price-adjusted rolling intrinsic (PARI) policy,” is developed based on theoretical analysis of the value of storage options. This heuristic adjusts prices before applying the RI policy, and the adjusted prices inform the RI policy about the values of various storage options. Our numerical experiments show that the PARI policy is especially capable of recovering high value losses of the RI policy. For the instances where the RI policy loses more than 4% of the optimal storage value, the PARI policy on average is able to recover more than 90% of the value loss.