Optimal Battery Control Under Cycle Aging Mechanisms in Pay for Performance Settings
For battery operators in frequency regulation and renewable integration, this work provides a practical online control policy with theoretical guarantees, though it is incremental over existing degradation models.
The paper addresses optimal battery control under pay-for-performance settings, balancing signal following and degradation costs. It proposes an online threshold policy achieving near-optimal performance with an optimality gap independent of operation duration.
We study the optimal control of battery energy storage under a general "pay-for-performance" setup such as providing frequency regulation and renewable integration. In these settings, batteries need to carefully balance the trade-off between following the instruction signals and their degradation costs in real-time. Existing battery control strategies either do not consider the uncertainty of future signals, or cannot accurately account for battery cycle aging mechanism during operation. In this work, we take a different approach to the optimal battery control problem. Instead of attacking the complexity of battery degradation function or the lack of future information one at a time, we address these two challenges together in a joint fashion. In particular, we present an electrochemically accurate and trackable battery degradation model called the rainflow cycle-based model. We prove the degradation cost is convex. Then we propose an online control policy with a simple threshold structure and show it achieve near-optimal performance with respect to an offline controller that has complete future information. We explicitly characterize the optimality gap and show it is independent to the duration of operation. Simulation results with both synthetic and real regulation traces are conducted to illustrate the theoretical results.