Investigation of a wind integrated compressed air energy storage system

Abstract

Energy is what keeps our global economy running. It lights up our houses, runs our businesses, operates manufacturing plants and also powers up our transport. Without it our world will experience a sudden halt. Due to this fact we must make sure that energy is not wasted but rather harnessed and utilized in the most efficient manner. The concept of energy harnessing will determine how future societies live and it can have a profound effect on world issues such as climate change. This dissertation develops a software model of an innovative energy storage concept, known as Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES) and tests its operation in conjunction with a wind energy system. The CAES system is operated as an energy buffer to smooth out the fluctuations in the output power of the wind energy system. The smoothing operation is investigated under different wind profiles and turbine lags. Simulation results show that the quality of the net power transfer to the grid is significantly improved. The control of the energy level in the air reservoir during the smoothing operation was achieved through the implementation of two control strategies. The first control scheme uses a simple hysteresis buffer to halt the operation when the energy level drops while the second scheme introduces feedback to improve the performance. The resulting performance of the CAES system was tested by running the simulation for actual wind speed data. The application of the CAES system as a reactive power compensator for voltage regulation is also tested. Simulation results show that an introduced disturbance on the voltage at the point of common coupling was successfully overcome.