How does battery storage support frequency regulation on the grid? And how is the battery storage operator compensated?
In: Engineering
Electrical load presents itself as physical resistance at the generator. Let’s say we have a generator spinning 3600 RPM, and producing 60hz AC electricity. If we suddenly turned on all the conveyors in a large warehouse, at least for a moment that generator would be slugged with a lot more physical resistance, it might make the generator slow down to say 3400 RPM until it catches back up, and at 3400 RPM it’s only putting out 56.667hz power which is pretty far off the mark and pushes toward damaging sensitive equipment.
But if there’s battery storage, it can take the brunt of sudden increases in demand to keep it at 60hz as well as sucking up the surplus if we suddenly turned all those conveyors back off. Batteries store power as DC though so there will be a VFD or some other mechanism of switching between DC and AC. They can also play a role in interconnecting grids, having the power converted to DC and then back to AC where two different grids meet means the power plants themselves don’t have to do as much work to synchronize their power (they have to sync with others in the same grid but now there’s less worry about plants from other grids not controlled by the operator being out of sync in relation to themselves).
As for compensation I would imagine it’s utility companies operating their own systems, if not then they’ll either have a flat contract for $X per Y time period to provide this service, or use metering to measure overall net use.
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