The recent rapid growth of utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) deployment and the declining costs of energy storage technologies have stimulated interest in combining PV with energy storage to provide dispatchable energy (i.e., energy on demand) and reliable capacity (i.e., grid stability).
In particular, the use of lithium-ion batteries in U.S. utility-scale applications has grown in recent years owing to the technology’s favorable cost and performance characteristics.
This study is our first time to use bottom-up modeling to benchmark the installed costs of various standalone lithium-ion storage (with storage connected to the grid only) and PV-plus-storage (with storage connected to PV and the grid) system configurations. The PV-plus-storage configurations include 1) co-located PV-plus-storage systems vs. PV-plus-storage systems in different locations, and 2) direct current (DC) coupled vs. alternating current (AC) coupled battery configurations for the co-located PV-plus-storage systems.