The effect of ramp constraints on coalitional storage games

Energy storage systems (ESS) are envisaged as a solution to a vast number of problems in Smart Grids, yet their prices are hindering a massive adoption at residential level. To facilitate such massive deployments, we propose the shared investment in a battery among a group of consumers. We obtain conditions under which such collective purchase is profitable and show that the earnings that can be obtained by a community are directly linked to key properties of the battery, ramp constraints in particular, and individual intraday consumption profiles. This is achieved by modeling the investment problem using cooperative game theory. For an extensive class of relevant games, we provide theoretical results guaranteeing the existence of a non-empty core, i.e., a set of payoffs across consumers that are stable against the formation of sub-coalitions. Empirical validation of the results is carried with real consumption data from Pecan Street and characteristics of typical batteries available on the market.