Impacts of battery energy storage technologies and renewable integration on the energy transition in the New York State

In light of current energy policies responding to rapid climate change, much attention has been directed to developing feasible approaches for transitioning energy production from fossil-based resources to renewable energy. Although existing studies analyze regional dispatch of renewable energy sources and capacity planning, they do not fully explore the impacts of the energy storage system technology's technical and economic characteristics on renewable energy integration and energy transition, and the importance of energy storage systems to the energy transition is currently ignored. To fill this gap, we propose an integrated optimal power flow and multi-criteria decision-making model to minimize system cost under operational constraints and evaluate the operational performance of renewable energy technologies with multidimensional criteria. The proposed method can identify the most critical features of energy storage system technologies to enhance renewable energy integration and achieve New York State's climate goals from 2025 to 2040. We discover that lead-acid battery requires an additional 38.66 GW capacity of renewable energy sources than lithium-ion battery to achieve the zero carbon dioxide emissions condition. Based on the cross-sensitivity analysis in the multidimensional evaluation, the vanadium redox flow battery performs the best, and the nickel-cadmium battery performs the worst when reaching the zero carbon dioxide emissions target in 2040. The results of the proposed model can also be conveniently generalized to select ESS technology based on the criteria preferences from RE integration and energy transition studies and serve as a reference for ESS configurations in future energy and power system planning.