Renewable energy generation projects are often measured by their peak capacity. A wind farm rated at 25 MW will generate 25 MW of power under the right circumstances. This peak capacity is reached very little in practice. However, these generators are forced to purchase grid operation infrastructure that can handle this peak generation event. The high voltage grid connections are expensive and increasingly difficult to receive permits for. This work presents a solution in which the high voltage grid connection is undersized in comparison to the renewable energy generator. A battery energy storage system is installed in the local grid to solve the issue of excess energy generation (congestion).

A simulation of the local network has been built that models a battery energy storage system (BESS), the network and uses data from a solar park. A case study in which a 19 MW solar park is connected to the high voltage grid with a transformer of only 14 MW as well as a 14 MW | 30 MWh BESS on the network is investigated in the rest of the work. Furthermore a BESS control strategy for price arbitrage on the TenneT imbalance market is presented and encoded such that it can be optimised.

Four heuristics are presented that time and size the congestion issue in a manner the control strategy of the BESS can prepare for and solve congestion when necessary. These heuristics are tested against strategies optimized for revenue maximisation through price arbitrage. While the most aggressive strategies did not solve all the congestion events in these simulations, we found that the heuristic that takes the average generation of the solar park into account performs the best while remaining appropriately conservative.

A basic evolutionary algorithm is presented that optimizes a BESS control strategy for price arbitrage when the BESS is not needed on the local network to solve congestion. Although the strategies earn ~33% less revenue due to the congestion related limitations, the optimisation surrounding congestion does improve revenue by 2.58%.

The results presented in this work suggest that this setup of a local grid can be economically viable and that the BESS can solve the congestion issue when steered with an appropriate control strategy. We hope to inspire parties that battery energy storage systems can earn substantial revenue aside from solving issues on a (local) grid.