  As the penetration level of transmission-scale time-intermittent renewable
generation resources increases, control of flexible resources will become
important to mitigating the fluctuations due to these new renewable resources.
Flexible resources may include new or existing synchronous generators as well
as new energy storage devices. Optimal placement and sizing of energy storage
to minimize costs of integrating renewable resources is a difficult
optimization problem. Further,optimal planning procedures typically do not
consider the effect of the time dependence of operations and may lead to
unsatisfactory results. Here, we use an optimal energy storage control
algorithm to develop a heuristic procedure for energy storage placement and
sizing. We perform operational simulation under various time profiles of
intermittent generation, loads and interchanges (artificially generated or from
historical data) and accumulate statistics of the usage of storage at each node
under the optimal dispatch. We develop a greedy heuristic based on the
accumulated statistics to obtain a minimal set of nodes for storage placement.
The quality of the heuristic is explored by comparing our results to the
obvious heuristic of placing storage at the renewables for IEEE benchmarks and
real-world network topologies.
