Can energy storage power stations recover their costs

Moreover, the economic benefits under different subsidy policies are studied, and the results show that energy storage can recover the cost with appropriate subsidy policies (the subsidy of 0.071 USD/kWh for pumped storage power stations is sufficient while the subsidy of 0.142 USD/kWh is required for electrochemical power stations).

For different types of energy storage, the initial investment varies greatly. At present, the investment cost of a pumped storage power station is about 878–937 million USD/GW, which is far higher than that of a battery storage power station, and is closely related to location.

However, no matter how the energy storage power station participates in the electricity market, the IRR of both power stations does not exceed 10%. This means that there is always a risk of loss in the investment of energy storage power stations.

However, in general, when energy storage participates in the electricity market, the losses are serious according to the current market mechanism, especially when the station participates in the energy market alone (the annual loss of Yixing power station was about 35.52 million USD, and that of Zhenjiang power station was about 11.6 million USD).

In general, the initial cost of an energy storage power station mainly includes the investment cost of the energy storage unit, power conversion unit, and other investment costs such as labor and service costs for initial installation. The specific calculations of these three parts used the formulas in Appendix 2 of literature [ 29 ].

In the energy market, energy storage stations gain profits through peak-valley arbitrage. That is, the energy storage system stores electricity during low electricity price periods and discharges it during high electricity price periods.