Taming wind energy with battery storage

The use of wind to generate electrical energy is becoming more popular around the world as global efforts are made to deal with green house gas emissions from more traditional sources of energy. In Australia wind energy is one of the technologies being promoted by mandatory renewable energy targets set by the government [1]. Even though wind energy is more economical and eco-friendly it has one significant problem. The electricity production is inherently highly variable and difficult to predict. Over longer time scales it means that it is difficult to match electricity generation to the daily and seasonal patterns of demand. On shorter time scales the higher frequency 'noise' in electricity output causes problems for network stability and managing the short term dispatch of generators to meet demand.