The importance of accurate battery models for power assessment in smart energy systems

The smart energy system is characterized by a broader combination of various energy sources and energy storage devices with smart control management and increased attention to optimization for increasing energy efficiency. The fundamental dimension in the smart energy system design is the power assessment of the possible design architecture. This demand imposes a need for accurately tracking the system’s power flow, simulating and validating the system’s behavior, and applying additional optimization and exploration during the design time. Thus, it is evident that simulation is a critical step in the design flow of a smart energy system. One essential element to enable such accurate simulation is the precise model of the power generation and consumption. While sophisticated models for energy sources exist, the power flow in the system does not perfectly match the power drawn from the energy storage devices because the battery, as the primary energy storage device in the smart energy system, has non-ideal discharge characteristics. We propose adopting an elaborate battery model for the smart energy system’s accurate power assessment in this work. We show the importance of battery model accuracy when conducting a power assessment using two different case studies.