Storage Participation in Electricity Markets: Arbitrage and Ancillary Services

Electricity storage is used for intertemporal price arbitrage and for ancillary services that balance unforeseen supply and demand fluctuations via frequency regulation. We present an optimization model that computes bids for both arbitrage and frequency regulation and ensures that storage operators can honor their market commitments at all times for all fluctuation signals in an uncertainty set inspired by market rules. This requirement, initially expressed by an infinite number of nonconvex functional constraints, is shown to be equivalent to a finite number of deterministic constraints. The resulting formulation is a mixed-integer bilinear program that admits mixed-integer linear relaxations and restrictions. Empirical tests on European electricity markets show a negligible optimality gap between the relaxation and the restriction. The model can account for intraday trading and, with a solution time of under 5 seconds, may serve as a building block for more complex trading strategies. Such strategies become necessary as battery capacity exceeds the demand for ancillary services. In a backtest from 1 July 2020 through 30 June 2024 joint market participation more than doubles profits and almost halves energy storage output compared to arbitrage alone.