Using a two-way inverter to convert between AC and DC power, batteries can store power when the electricity from the grid is available and discharge to meet the load during a time of power outage. Advances in electric vehicle energy storage technology have led to a sustained decrease in the price of electrical storage. We studied the use of battery storage to allow a set of homes in a single residential neighbourhood to avoid power outages. In essence, the entire neighbourhood can be thought to be connected to a single large uninterruptible power supply.
Storage is still expensive, however, so our goal is to choose the smallest battery size such that, with high target probability, there is no loss of load despite a grid outage. Recognizing that the most common approach today for mitigating outages is to use diesel generators, we also study the related problem of minimizing the carbon footprint of diesel generator operation by minimizing generator operation.
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S. Singla. On Using Storage and Genset for Mitigating Power Grid Failures, MMath thesis, University of Waterloo, April 2013.