Strategic energy storage investments: A case study of the CAISO electricity market

Energy storage can provide a range of revenue streams for investors in electricity markets. However, as their deployments continue to rise, storage will no longer be a player on the sidelines and remain a price-taker, rather, these assets will start to impact prices. In this study, accounting for energy storage as a price-maker and using data from CAISO, we investigate strategic market behavior among competing investors using a non-cooperative game. We establish a centralized optimization problem to compute the market equilibrium. In the game, each investor initially decides on how much to invest and then how to operate their asset over a time horizon. Investors are allowed to deploy different energy storage technologies. Analytically, we show that an increasing number of investors will increase the market competition thereby reducing profits while increasing the total capacity of storage deployed. Numerically, our key findings include: (a) the difference in optimal investments under price-taker and price-maker assumptions, (b) as wind and solar assets expand under different resource-mix scenarios, there is a corresponding non-monotonic variation in arbitrage potential for energy storage, (c) when competition is intense and investors are allowed to invest in different technologies, a slight increase in storage technology performance can significantly improve an investor’s profit share, (d) when the arbitrage opportunity increases with renewables, longer duration storage technologies may gain an advantage, (e) Li-ion batteries dominate the market under low-moderate renewable energy penetration or with steep energy-capacity cost reductions in the future. •We develop a game-theoretical framework for strategic investments in energy storage.•The framework derives a centralized optimization problem to compute the Nash equilibrium.•The impact of energy storage on market price is characterized using CAISO data.•We present insights on arbitrage potential and market competition for energy storage investors.•We quantify the effects of the number of investors, renewable energy levels, and technology heterogeneity.