With growing concern regarding environmental issues and the need for a more sustainable grid, power systems have seen a fast expansion of renewable resources in the last decade. The uncertainty and variability of renewable resources has posed new challenges on system operators. Due to its energy-shifting and fast-ramping capabilities, energy storage (ES) has been considered as an attractive solution to alleviate the increased renewable uncertainty and variability.

In this dissertation, stochastic optimization is utilized to evaluate the benefit of bulk energy storage to facilitate the integration of high levels of renewable resources in transmission systems. A cost-benefit analysis is performed to study the cost-effectiveness of energy storage. A two-step approach is developed to analyze the effectiveness of using energy storage to provide ancillary services. Results show that as renewable penetrations increase, energy storage can effectively compensate for the variability and uncertainty in renewable energy and has increasing benefits to the system.

With increased renewable penetrations, enhanced dispatch models are needed to efficiently operate energy storage. As existing approaches do not fully utilize the flexibility of energy storage, two approaches are developed in this dissertation to improve the operational strategy of energy storage. The first approach is developed using stochastic programming techniques. A stochastic unit commitment (UC) is solved to obtain schedules for energy storage with different renewable scenarios. Operating policies are then constructed using the solutions from the stochastic UC to efficiently operate energy storage across multiple time periods. The second approach is a policy function approach. By incorporating an offline analysis stage prior to the actual operating stage, the patterns between the system operating conditions and the optimal actions for energy storage are identified using a data mining model. The obtained data mining model is then used in real-time to provide enhancement to a deterministic economic dispatch model and improve the utilization of energy storage. Results show that the policy function approach outperforms a traditional approach where a schedule determined and fixed at a prior look-ahead stage is used. The policy function approach is also shown to have minimal added computational difficulty to the real-time market.

Today, the electric power system faces new challenges from rapid developing technology and the growing concern about environmental problems. The future of the power system under these new challenges needs to be planned and studied. However, due to the high degree of computational complexity of the optimization problem, conducting a system planning study which takes into account the market structure and environmental constraints on a large-scale power system is computationally taxing. To improve the execution time of large system simulations, such as the system planning study, two possible strategies are proposed in this thesis. The first one is to implement a relative new factorization method, known as the multifrontal method, to speed up the solution of the sparse linear matrix equations within the large system simulations. The performance of the multifrontal method implemented by UMFAPACK is compared with traditional LU factorization on a wide range of power-system matrices. The results show that the multifrontal method is superior to traditional LU factorization on relatively denser matrices found in other specialty areas, but has poor performance on the more sparse matrices that occur in power-system applications. This result suggests that multifrontal methods may not be an effective way to improve execution time for large system simulation and power system engineers should evaluate the performance of the multifrontal method before applying it to their applications. The second strategy is to develop a small dc equivalent of the large-scale network with satisfactory accuracy for the large-scale system simulations. In this thesis, a modified Ward equivalent is generated for a large-scale power system, such as the full Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) system. In this equivalent, all the generators in the full model are retained integrally. The accuracy of the modified Ward equivalent is validated and the equivalent is used to conduct the optimal generation investment planning study. By using the dc equivalent, the execution time for optimal generation investment planning is greatly reduced. Different scenarios are modeled to study the impact of fuel prices, environmental constraints and incentives for renewable energy on future investment and retirement in generation.