H. Saboori - Student member, IEEE
S. Dehghan, - Student member, IEEE
S. Jadid, - Member, IEEE

Renewable energy sources (RES), especially wind power plants, have high priority of promotion in the energy policies worldwide. An increasing share of RES and distributed generation (DG), should, as has been assumed, provide improvement in reliability of electricity delivery to the customers. Paper presented here concentrates on electricity storage systems technologies and applications pinpointing renewable energies variability removal. It can be seen from presented issues that there are numerous options to energy storage systems which can assist in generation and load shifting, peak shaving, transmission expansion planning deferral, ancillary services procurement, and power quality issues. Focus of applications is on renewable resources intermittency elimination. Some related issues including relation between electricity markets and storage systems, system expansion and storage systems, and correlation among smart grid issues and storage systems are also presented. As a result, some comparisons are conducted in terms of various interested criterions in the field of energy storage comprising storage capacity, power level, response time, unit investment and operation costs, round trip efficiency, physical dimensions, cycle life time, life time, availability, and environmental impacts.

Ancillary services procurement; electricity market; energy storage systems (ESS); renewable energy resources; smart grid; storage applications