As an effective approach of implementing power load shifting, fostering the accommodation of renewable energy, such as the wind and solar generation, energy storage technique is playing an important role in the smart grid and energy internet. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is a promising energy storage technology due to its cleanness, high efficiency, low cost, and long service life. This paper surveys state-of-the-art technologies of CAES, and makes endeavors to demonstrate the fundamental principles, classifications and operation modes of CAES. Critical subsystems of CAES are elaborated exhaustively. The application prospects and further research directions are summarized to promote the popularization of CAES in smart grid and energy internet.

The high penetration of volatile renewable energy challenges power system operation. Energy storage units (ESUs) can shift the demand over time and compensate real-time discrepancy between generation and demand, and thus improve system operation flexibility and reduce renewable energy curtailment. This paper proposes two parametric optimization models to quantify how the power (MW) and energy (MWh) capacity of ESU would impact renewable energy utilization from two aspects: renewable energy curtailment and system flexibility for uncertainty mitigation. The two indicators are characterized as multivariate functions in the capacity parameters of ESUs. A severity ranking algorithm is suggested to pick up critical scenarios of fluctuation patterns from the uncertainty set; consequently, the proposed models come down to multi-parametric mixed-integer linear programs (mp-MILPs) which can be solved by a decomposition algorithm. The proposed method provides analytical expressions of the two indicators as functions in MW and MWh capacity. Such a characterization delivers abundant sensitivity information on the impact of ESU capacity parameters, and provides a powerful tool for visualization and useful reference for storage sizing. Case studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and demonstrate how to use the geometric information.